Black and White Portrait

For this assignment we were asked to take a black and white beuty portrait and convey either an emotion that represented their personality, or any emotion you wanted to. We also had to use the lighting and emphasis of the face of the person, that Irving Penn used in his photograph of Al Pachino. I chose Anna to be my model, and at the start of the shoot I wanted to portray the emotion of lazyness/tired. However, while shooting, I found it very difficult to not get "dead eyes" when doing so. Instead I changed my emotion to sadness/depression. I did this by tilting her face till half of it was black, and the other half brightly lit. I intendid the black side to show the darkness, depression, and gloom that was slowly enveloping her. Another technique I used was taking the photo higher than her eye level. This helped emphasised how it feels to be depressed and sad, because when your in that state, you often feel more lowly than those around you. The thing I do regret about this photo is that the top right corner of her face is lit and that it makes her face slightly deformed looking. The other regret is that I didn't make the left side backround dark like Irving Penn did. Overall I am very pleased with how my photo came out.