The Main Portrait

For this assignment, we were tasked with taking a portrait of someone else, either to tell a story or to lead to the person's face. I don't really work too well with asking random people to take their picture, so I decided to take pictures of my friends. We needed to take at least 30 pictures for this assignment and the person HAD to know that their picture was being taken.

For this image, I wanted to tell a small story and inform viewers of the person's personality. I decided to do something where he was somewhat blocking his face with his hands in a "don't look!" sort of way, and I also wanted to include some of his smirk to help the audience relate to my subject and be more intrigued in the photo. What I really wanted to do in this photo was to use his hands as an artificial frame to frame around his single eye, helping the audience lead straight to that single focal point. I kept his eye in focus while his hands were more out of focus to help enforce this composition.

I managed to take this photo in one take, which turned out really well for a slower shutter speed. I made this image black and white and added some more contrast to keep any distracting colors out of the photo and keep the focus on the single eye, which actually follows rule of thirds quite well by being in the direct center of the image.

Overall, I think portraits may be one of my favorite kinds of images since you can do so much with them and make them so unique and different, and they're so much more recognizable when the image includes a person.