Portraiture

HNC Photography

It’s all over. Officially. The certificate arrived in the post (much like the Higher one, although this one actually made it to the right address this year) and my former class mates are off onto the HND. I’ll do mine next year once I’ve worked a bit and paid off a few bills.

So I thought I’d do a bit of a collection of the different work I’ve accumulated over the year of work. So the year started with the still life unit, so there was some studio work but we went outside with lego for It’s a Small World. Then I took it further as the unit ended with the tiny model railway people re-enacting Hands, Face, Space. Some of the other work from the Still Life unit appeared in my more general Autumn post.
New year, new lockdown and we did most of Portraiture in our own homes and I ran a little short on models. The final term was Documentary photography and my final project was Unsafe Spaces. In which I discovered that Photoshop could really use a spell checker function. The Applied Photography unit showed that there was more than just taking photos… The infrared or ultra violet were pretty different although quite easy to do on a basic scale. A more practical application of the infrared was the trail camera. Watching Indy at night wasn’t exactly riveting but it was something I wanted to try for a long time. Finally there was an accumulation of work in an over haul of the Portfolio and the way this site looks.

So it’s just a matter of wait and earn… and hope they let me back in next year…..

I have a sort of existential dread and cold sweat that comes over me when I think about telling models (or indeed the poor friends and family) that end up in front of my camera what to do. So when portraiture came up in the course there was a little panic. This is probably the only time the coronavirus has been helpful as I could mostly work with people I knew to get the work done.

Clockwise from top left – With a Precious Object, Through Glass, Without a Face, Self-portrait in the Style of an Artist (Picasso in this case) and With Movement.

My poor mother… She hasn’t quite gotten over the shame of wandering round the building we’ve not long moved to dressed in my Harry Potter cosplay robe. Each of these images had briefs of their own. The self portrait is built of 6 different images and was almost a bit of a cheat. I didn’t want to turn my camera on myself directly, at that time anyway, so built it out of old selfies. The thing is I can take good shots of people if they don’t know it.

Clockwise from top left – Work from my Higher at the Christmas Style Mile Carnival and the SEC Craft Fair, a shot from the night photography workshop in Edinburgh and my personal favourite, The Shoe Seller in Tenerife.

None of these were posed…..And I almost prefer these to formal, posed images. Heck “The Shoe Seller” is a bit of a portfolio fixture at this point. I accept that there’s a definite need for images that are posed. It’s maybe just not my thing just now. Need to work on it though because I’ll need to do a studio shoot or two when I get back into the college buildings.