Memento - Traces of Identity.

For this project, we were asked to look at traces of the past. I quite like this brief, as it is quite broad.

I would like to revolve my idea around emotions. I think that this can fit the brief quite nicely because emotions are things that are felt in the moment, can be left in the past, or be dragged with you to the present day. I think that I could also make these photographs about identity as well, as people change all the time as well.

As I said in the Motion Blur project, I wanted to do something with motion-blur portraits. I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity with that

The first piece of research that I did was the 'daguerreotypes' of the Victorian era. Daguerreotypes are copper plates coated in a photosensitive chemical that is slid into a camera, and when the photo is taken, the lens projects the image onto the plate, resulting in a physical photo. The technology here is very primitive, so the shutter would have taken around 15 minutes to properly expose the plate. This meant that any live subjects would look blurry. Often, the Victorians would have portraits taken of dead relatives, where the body would be propped up with a stand in such a way that they look as if they are posing for the photograph. Because they were dead, they were able to stay completely still, which meant that they were perfectly sharp in the final image. If there were live relatives posing by the body in the photograph, then they would often look blurry whereas the dead body would be in focus, which results in this very creepy look where the dead person looks alive whereas the live people look like ghostly figures. I thought that this look was very intriguing, so I wanted to do something similar.

The second piece of research I did was to do with a photographer called Francesca Woodman. She shot black and white photographs, in which are some very eerie portraits of people. In some photos they pose in such a way that doesn't seem human at all. She also played quite a bit with motion blur, which was very useful to me to use as inspiration for my shoots.

The first shoot for this project didn't go so well. The idea that I had on how to execute it was that I wanted to get one clear photo of myself and one motion-blurred one, to act as characters similar to the people in the Victorian daguerreotypes- one dead, one alive. The problem that I had here was that when I had one photo with a high shutter speed and one with a low shutter speed, I had difficulty matching the level of light in both. The high shutter speed photo came out darker than the other so when I went to edit the photos together later on, I couldn't make it look good at all. I scrapped the idea of having two separate photos to merge together, and I went for another approach.

The second shoot didn't work either. Instead of having one subject, I thought I could have two. One would stay perfectly still, and the other would move about, resulting in the look that I wanted to achieve. The only issue was that I couldn't stay 100% perfectly still with the slow shutter speed, which meant that I was slightly blurry too, which didn't look too great.

The third shoot worked perfectly. I thought that I didn't want to follow the daguerreotype thing too closely, and I would rather use it as inspiration rather than trying to replicate the look entirely. This allowed me to be more free with what I wanted to do, instead of trying to make something look like another thing. I didn't want to go in with too clear of an idea either, I wanted to come out with something spontaneous. Also, to make sure I knew what I was doing with the camera, I viewed a few online tutorials on how to use shutter speed to make it look like your subject is a ghost, just so I could know what I was doing rather than just blindly put in random settings and hope for the best. Initially I began posing around my bedroom (a place that for me has always been constantly changing, from house to house, different interior design, etc. it will always change too) but I wanted to focus more on the portraiture side of things. I grabbed a nearby lamp to use as a directional light, shone it over my face, which darkened the background and isolated me in the shot. Then, as I was taking the photographs, I started to move around to create the motion blur effect. There is one photograph that I am particularly proud of, which I will use for my final piece. it is where my face starts out at the bottom right corner of the frame, and it like it has been dragged up to the top;, where you can see the light coming from the lamp. Also, as the face moves along the image the expression changes, which plays perfectly into the entire idea of emotions changing over time. Since I had chosen which photograph I wanted to use as my final piece, I began to digitally edit it.

There is still a lot of dust on my lens, which I think in this photo is both a help and a hindrance. It resulted in that odd hexagon on the left of the shot, but it also left black lines over the image. They were only small, so I used a heal tool to swiftly remove them. Then, I felt like making the blacks a little deeper and the highlights a little more defined, so I increased the contrast, and I also heightened the saturation, for good measure. I then added a soft glow to the overall image, and added some blue colour correction to give it a quick ethereal feel, and I was done.