Exam Shoot One - Work Record

For my first exam shoot, I am going to be shooting on location. During this shoot, I am going to be using both the plain white mask and the painted white mask, both of which were incorporated into many of my exam preparation shoots. The plan for the shoot is to take pictures using long exposures of my subject while they move their head from side to side and have their hands over their face and alternate between long and fast exposures and plain and painted masks.

I hope to capture a detailed depiction of what it is to have a mental disorder, portraying it as something that has many layers and details rather than being a simple, two dimensional matter.

Here is a photo from my shoot that I feel was successful.

This image was shot using an aperture of F22, an ISO of 100 and a shutter speed of 1/2 a second, which allowed me to achieve a large amount of motion blur. Although the shutter speed was not a very long one for motion blur photography, my subject was moving very fast which allowed me to achieve a large amount of motion blur without letting to much light in over a very long exposure, which would have likely made the image overexposed. I feel that this image is one of the best exposed images from my shoot, as the bricks in the background are the right shade of dark red, while the white of the mask is not blinding and doesn't take over the rest of the picture. Another thing I feel went well with this image is the composition. I used a rule of thirds composition for this photo, placing my subject along the right horizontal line of the grid, so that your eyes are drawn instantly to him. Also, I feel this image is one that links strongly into my topic; the blur created an effect in which you can almost see two faces, which creates connotations of distorted reality. This is something you would experience if you suffered from a mental disorder such as Schizophrenia. 

On the other hand, here is an image from my shoot that I feel was not very successful. This was one of the first images I took, which incorporated the painted mask rather than the plain one. I shot this on a aperture of f22, an ISO of 100 and a shutter speed of one second. This shutter speed was twice as slow as what I used in the previous shoot, meaning too much light was let into the shutter, making the picture over-exposed. Even if the conditions I shot in were darker so that less light would have been let in, a one second shutter speed wouldn't have been needed to achieve a large amount of motion blur, bearing in mind that my subject was making small fast movements with his head. Finally, I would say that this image was focussed on the wrong part of the composition, as it appears that the background is in focus but my subject's face is not. However, this could be because of the overexposure and excessive motion blur, as when shooting at f22, there will be a very wide depth of field in which everything in the photo is in focus.

For my next shoot, I will be continuing with using the mask to present mental disorders while capturing motion blur using long exposures, however, I will be implementing this into a studio environment and adding a spotlight, a snoot and a black backdrop to the setup.