Avedon Project

For this project I decided to revisit my series of Avedon style photographs and make a few more. I kept his technique of serious, black and white photos. These portraits are intended to bring a more real connection rather than posed and smiling. This is another draft of portraits to go into the final collection of my Richard Avedon segment.

Halloween

This week our project was to incorporate halloween into our photographs. We used masks, cloaks, hands, and anything else we could find to enhance the halloween spirit. We thought about what scared us as kids and which monsters and villains disturbed us the most as a starting point. After playing around with lighting and setting, we uploaded our pictures to picnik's website. They have a new set of halloween effects that we played with. A lot of these effects helped us to better see the design process of advertisements on things like posters.

Stories

For this project we experimented with the concept of foreground/background again. This time we used small action figures to create different stories. We used many different ways to capture the figures in different settings with books, pictures, people, and computer backgrounds. To portray a fantasy feel on our pictures we created backdrops with  soft focus. This project was all about creativity, playing around with ways to contrast a figure and its background.

Portraits Final

We really got to learn what it was like in  Avedon's shoes after many attempts at his technique of photographing portraits. We would take a set of portraits, edit them, and then come back to them the next day with a different eye. This process helped us to better see what a professional photographers editing process is like. 

Portraits 3

Portraits 2

Portraits

After watching a movie about Richard Avedon's photography, we were challenged to experiment in his shoes. We focused on Avedon's technique of capturing who someone really is through a black and white portrait.  He would have his models not put on an expression so he could express a deep connection on their face. Sometimes he would manipulate and talk to them in order for a deeper expression to show. He would ask someone to imagine if their dog died, and instantly would be able to capture an incredible feeling.  He would sit with the camera until he got the perfect shot. Being a person who always had a critique for his photos, it took time.  He knew how to capture real, even hidden emotion within every picture. When you look at Avedon's portraits you feel the connection that was directly made through the camera lens at the moment he captured it.