I asked my mum to hold the photographs up at face level and then asked her questions about the traumatic experience. I have heard snippets of this story before and so partly knew what to expect. My mum described the ordeal as an "out of body experience" and said she was terrified as many surgeons entered the room in scrubs and were rushing around. I am not fully happy with the positioning of this photo. My idea was to take from further back, to incorporate some contextual background, however I wanted to keep the camera level and so placed in on the table, but certain objects got in the way. I should have perhaps gotten out a tripod.
I like this photo as it is quite comical, due to the moment at which it has been captured and the presumption that my mum is about to swear, which she did when describing the pain. However, the positioning of this photograph is all wrong as I have cut off her head and the photographs. I wanted the photo's to be slightly blurrier to highlight the importance of the current emotion, but was frustrated by the slight glare on these photo's and by the lighting of the room in general as it wasn't very dramatic.
I experimented by turning on a lamp to the side of my mum and placing a white polystyrene surface next to her to counteract the amount of light from the key light. The white wall in the background acted as a "backlight" of sorts, thus creating an albeit simplistic 3 point lighting system. However the light was quite orange as you can see from the photo's below.
In this photograph I tried to effect dramatic lighting by dimming the lights and using the full light the key light. As you can tell it wasn't the best idea as the photographs are not visible and the shadows are very over the top.
I like the expression of my mum's face in the 2 photographs above as they are subtle and not over the top as some of the others are in this series. I feel they sum up the story my mum has relayed to me well. The things I do not like are the dark lighting and the fact that the focus has shifted to my mums hands holding the photographs rather than her face, whereas I wanted her face to be in focus as it symbolises the reality over the false.
Out of all of the photographs that I took today, this is my favourite. It is a little to orange and
the photographs slightly glared/in the way, however, despite all of this my mum and I feel that her facial expression is the most concurrent with how she felt at the time. If you stare at it you can see bits of all different emotions. On the right hand side her mouth curves up slightly portraying a half smile where as on the other side it curves down. Her eyes, although somewhat engaging with the viewer, seem to look past us into a different time or memory. I think it is one of the more visually complex photographs of the series and have used photoshop to edit it in different ways to make it even more so. Here are a few examples:
In this photograph I have muted the colours in terms of vibrance and saturation. I have also heightened the shadows to give the photo slightly more light, as well as to bring out the detail and lines in my mothers skin which I find really interesting. I have also altered the clarity and contrast to make the photo sharper and darker.
I personally prefer this version better as the orange lighting has been eliminated and thus I think it is more aesthetically pleasing. I also like how it could come across as more truthful as this aesthetic is synonymous with truth, evidence and reality.
Update: 26/04/2013
I was not aware of the different types of shooting until recently and unfortunately did not shoot these photo's in camera RAW and so they are compressed lower quality images that they should be. Since then I have been photographing in RAW uncompressed files and have been attaining higher quality photographs. However, I am still drawn to the photograph which I have chosen in this section and hope to use edit it effectively and use it in my project.
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