Production Journal

Emotion is a strong word with a variety of expressions. Being able to capture emotion and tell a story through the feeling captured in a photograph is a form of art. The ability for the viewer to feel, understand, and relate to the emotion captured in an image is every photographer’s goal. My objective for this project was to do the best that I could to capture emotion through black and white images. Using Monica as my model, I attempted portrait photography through the exploration of different angles and lighting. My goal was to be able to capture some kind of emotion that could be understood by the viewer. The tone that I was trying to portray through the black and white images was one of pure feeling and emotion. I wanted the focus of my photography to be the face or the eyes of Monica and the body language she was trying to portray. Our faces reveal the emotion and our body language tells the story behind the emotion and this is why most of my images are not simply just of the face.

Pre-Production:

            My original idea in regards to this project was to capture emotion using various models in differing locations. I wanted to capture my friend on the Diving team before he was about to do a dive, my friend and her boyfriend glancing into each others eyes, two of my friends embracing, and a person becoming frustrated while studying in the library. These were some of my original ideas. Although the overall plan has changed, the goal of my project has remained the same. Emotion is the centerpiece of my project and I can only hope that this shines through in my work. I decided to choose the simpler route because I felt that differing actions and emotions would only distract from my main goal—capturing emotion. One person can experience and display many different emotions and I wanted to capture that through the use of one model and one location.

Production:

            Capturing real emotion is a difficult thing to do. I carried out my plan by taking a plethora of pictures and never becoming frustrated with the difficulty level of the subject of emotion. I constantly tried (and often failed) taking pictures from different angles and guiding Monica to make different faces and emit different emotions. Although this was difficult, one of the hardest parts of production was deciding which images were edited from the presentation and which images remained. Due to the magnitude of pictures that I captured, this was a difficult task. I then edited the pictures by making them black and white and either lightening or darkening the image. Since there was plenty of sunlight during production, editing was not that difficult. I think what worked was making the images black and white but what could use more work is my Photoshop skills because I think the images could have been edited a bit more.

Post-Production:

            After completion of this project I learned that I have a real passion for portrait photography. It is simply more than finding a person and taking a picture of them. This project really proved to me how difficult it often times can be to capture a powerful image that grabs a viewer’s eye. By doing this project I had to force myself to think about the best way to capture feeling in an image and through this I learned that we display our emotions in more than just the face. It is safe to say I am no professional but this project has made me that much better at photography. If I could do this project over again I would experiment with different props and different lighting and see what other images I could come up with. Overall, I could have done more experimentation in my project.