Shaun McCue HND1B

Photography student based in Glasgow

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Personal Review

A story told with Adobe Spark

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First attempt at using the pen tool to make a cut out. This was pretty tricky and required a lot of patience to go over each individual point. It took a little bit of getting used to.

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was having a practice of using different selection tools in imaging class this morning. This will come in handy when it comes to the movie poster brief. 

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Who Am I?

Final triptych

After forming the ideas. I did worry slightly about how this would actually look visually. I think it looks better than I thought it would

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Who Am I?

Object

Thinking of an object to describe myself was a tricky idea. I dont have any significant objects that i have owned for a long time. It took me a long time to think of an idea for this. My thoughts were “there are so many aspects of any one person, how can this be shown simply with one item?” 

As a joke, a thought entered my head of “I will just have to photograph a jigsaw, as I am a bit of a puzzle”. Then i thought, thats actually quite a good idea. 

I think this symbolizes how complex we all are. One piece of a jigsaw wouldnt make sense until all the pieces come together to form an image. Much like myself. Life in general can also sometimes be much of a puzzle.

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Who Am I?

Place

When it came to deciding on a location to show who I am, straight away, I knew it would be something local to where I live in the southside of Glasgow. I couldnt think of a better place to show than Queens park. This is one of my favourite spots in the city, and a place ive frequented since I was a child. I have many memories of this place.

This path leads towards a flagpole, which offers a viewpoint across the city. I find it very peaceful and calming. It is just a beautiful spot.

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Who Am I? 

Self Portrait.

Introspective photography really gets me thinking. There are many ways to perceive the self, how best to convey this?

After spending some time writing a list of words that i feel describe myself. I decided I wanted to somehow show the daydreamer in me. I looked online at some self portraits by artists using mirrors, to show reflection, looking in the mirror to see themselves. I was fascinated with using some kind of reflection in my image. 

I experimented with double exposures in camera on my classmates camera. This didnt work out, so I opted to take two different images and just layer one on top of the other. The first photo showed myself from behind, looking out of the window. The second photo, showed me in the same pose, this time with a mirror placed in front of the window. 

I placed the mirror image on top of the first and brushed this in place showing only my face in the right area.

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Seeing the light.

1st image - My classmate Sadia beneath a tree at Kelvingrove park. The leaves created a nice shaped shadow effect across Sadias face. I also have an out of focus leaf in the foreground of the image. 

2nd image - This is a stranger in the street. A homeless man under the arch at royal exchange square. This was my first time photographing a stranger in the street. I made use of the natural light coming down at a 45 degree angle. This was quite an overcast day, so the light was not too harsh.

3rd image - This is another stranger at the botanic gardens in the west end. This man wanted me to take a photo of him in the gardens, so I made use of the opportunity to take one on my own camera. The gardens have a glass roof, which makes for great lighting all around. 

4th image - This is my little brother. For this shot, I had him standing in front of a wall with the sun behind him. This created a nice rim lighting effect around the top of his head and ears. This meant i had to stand facing the sun, which caused a huge glare in my lens. I simply covered the top of the lens with my hand to block the excess light

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Final clean white digital image. Before and after optimisation.

This was quite a tricky pose to get right. I was shooting using a Canon 6D and an 85 mm lens. Because the lens was so close up, the tiniest head movement sometimes brought the head out of frame. Between shooting, i also made adjustments to the background lights, as the histogram showed some areas of the background as not completely white. Adjustments meant moving the polyboards around in the background. 

This image showed a little bit of the polyboard in the background. I used the brush tool in photoshop to remove this.

Though black and white, the image still lacked the right amount of contrast. I put the image through Silver efex 2 in the Nik collection in photoshop. I brought the contrast up here, and applied a film type filter using Kodak ISO 32 Panatomic X. This was after a great deal of time spent applying masks and layers and adjusting curves to get the right effect. In the end, the only layer I adjusted was around the eyes to brighten them and make the white of the eye more white. 

I also shot this on Ilford HP5 film, though had some issues with the studio flash, so I borrowed a classmates camera to shoot some exposures. This was the same camera, though my classmate used Ilford FP4. After printing a contact sheet in the darkroom, I decided to make a print using the FP4 negatives.

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I had a practice run this morning on emulating the above image. This got me to grips with the set up of the lights and metering this properly etc. The below image is not perfect, though I feel i have made progress in emulating this better next time, now that I have an idea of how to set up everything in place for this.

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Clean White Research

I researched some photographers online who have taken black and white portraits in studio with a clean white background. One photographer I looked at was Platon. There are so many great images like this on his website. He has shot a lot of celebrities from actors, to politicians, from artists, to writers. He tends to use a very tight crop to get closer to the subject and bring out as much character as possible.

I also looked at American portait photographer, Phllipe Halsmans work. I didnt find many with a clean white background, though these two images of Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali are nice. Halsman tends to produce a lot of unusual surreal portraits.

And finally, I looked at the work of Yousuf Karsh, known for his portraits of notable individuals. I actually did some research on Karsh at college last year. I was struck by the photo of Audrey Hepburn. Its very basic and simple looking, though very elegant at the same time. I would like to try and emulate this photo.

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Photographic Events of the 1920's

A story told with Adobe Spark

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Some photos from yesterday, out shooting daylight portraits in the West end

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Gillian Wearing

A story told with Adobe Spark

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Todays task in imaging class was to choose a subject showing a wide dynamic range of brightness and shadows. These were shot in RAW and JPEG formats. I then had to take the same picture 2 stops underexposed and another 2 stops overexposed. The images were then optimised in camera raw to make them seem identical. Notice the difference in the histograms, in that the RAW files contain more information where some has been lost in the JPEG files.

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Oops! Project

The aim of this project was to create a photograph which included as many errors as possible. The top image was the result. You can see the image is very dark and slightly blurry. You can see the effects of camera shake here. Also notice the amount of dust on the camera sensor.

After creating this, I then optimised this in photoshop to attempt to remove these errors

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These are the last two images to feature in my portfolio. I thought it would be nice to finish on two portraits. One if a studio side lighting shot of miriam, the other is a studio portrait of Angela. These are nice quiet images to finish with. My peers and tutors mainly agreed with my choices to include all of these images. After such a long process from taking the images in the first place, to cutting them down to decide what to use, to finally featuring these images, I am extremely happy and very proud of the finished result.