I picked the theme of emotion because emotion is central to almost any picture. Also, I really just enjoy taking pictures of people and capturing them during natural or spontaneous moments. My goal was to portray some kind of emotion through every image that I have selected.
Pre-Production
My
preparation before my photo shoot with Monica as my model involved
brainstorming what emotions we wanted to portray and how we might go about
portraying them. In the end, however, we found that we couldn’t force too much
emotion. Most of the emotions pictured in this presentation came from honest
feelings.
Production
The production took awhile because
we found it was a lot harder than expected to portray different emotions. We
decided natural emotions were better for the presentation so we spent a lot of
time talking and snapping pictures when natural emotions became easier to
portray. There were a lot of pictures taken during production because it was
difficult to capture a good shot that also contained a real feeling or emotion.
Also, the camera was not fully charged so we had to take breaks to charge the
camera, but these breaks offered us the time to really think about the pictures
we had taken and how to improve them. The location of all the pictures is in
the hallway of the dorms. We did this so that there is a sense of repetition
and unity among all the pictures. We figured that a different location for
every picture would just be a distracting element considering the whole point
of the project was to simply capture raw emotion. This means that the
background does not really matter so we figured a white tiled wall would be the
simplest and least distracting background. The pictures were taken in the
middle of the day, which offered us plenty of natural light from the window in
the hallway. Lastly, the only equipment used was my digital Sony camera.
Post-Production
Looking back at the images now I am
not only happy that Monica is a great model who can express emotions very well
on her face, but I am also very satisfied with the emotions we were able to
capture. Although I wish we had better acting abilities and could have captured
a greater array of emotions, overall I think we did a good job and ended up
with a lot of photographs to choose from. Our original idea changed from us
photographing different subjects in different locations to just photographing
each other. I like our shift in ideas, however, because different subjects
could have distracted the viewer from the main theme of our project: emotion. Our
project is not about different people it is supposed to be all about different
emotions. By keeping our subjects and
location simple we were better able to convey the idea of emotion. To improve
our work I think I would have liked to have been able to take some kind of
acting class or been able to capture a raw emotion right as it was actually
happening. This is a lot easier said than done. Most people do not go and grab
their camera when their friend is crying or feeling depressed so capturing true
emotion would have been very difficult although I wish I could have been able
to do that. However, everyone portrays emotions on their faces at all times
during the day so I think our project was successful in capturing the emotions
that we could at the moment. Overall, I am satisfied with our project. I really
enjoy portrait photography so this project of capturing emotion is not over yet
for me.