Jasmine Forde: A Catch of Light

I shot my photos on an iPhone 4s with iOS 7.0.4. I also used the app Snapseed Version 1.6.1.

Knowing that we were shooting in black and white I wanted to make light a strong aspect of my photos because that would give me the contrast of whites to black that I wanted. I wanted to make sure that I had a range of tone from white to grey to black. I also wanted to utilize the natural light that floods into my apartment every morning. I waited until the mid afternoon when the sun was coming through my window at the perfect angle to create the shadow and shapes that I wanted of my object.  When I first shot the photo the contrast  looked good, but I wanted to crisp up the details and enhance the shadows. I also  had a lot more background detail around the piece that I felt was more distracting than enhancing. This is when I utilized the app Snapseed into my piece. Snapseed has different categories along the bottom of effects that it can add to your photo. It also has the ability to blur and change a photo to black and white. I first uploaded my picture into Snapseed and turned on the black and white filter and could edit the contrast of the black and white in the same screen. I changed the brightness of the photo to make the light brighter and the shadows deeper and set the photo brightness to about -60. I then changed the contrast slightly to about -20. In the same place I could also enhance the grain of the photo and found that if I set the grain to about +30 I could get the details of the background enhanced and also see the dust better in the foreground, which I really enjoyed. The background in the photo still really bothered me though because it distracted from my main focal point and so I went to the crop tool in the Snapseed app and cropped the photo in to what you see about. I then wanted to blur the background to make it even less distracting which I did in another tool called the center focus. This allowed me to select where to place the blur and also the strength of the blur. Tada! This is the magical recipe of how I created the way my photo came out.

Looking around the web at other photographers. I came across Richard Vantielcke, a current French conceptual and narrative photographer. He uses a lot of shadowing and really utilizes the dark tones in his work which I want to strive for in my future photographs. In his portraits he also uses a lot of simple poses but utilizes the light across the face to make a stand out piece. In my self portraits I relied mainly on light across my face and so there are some similarities between my work and Vantielcke's.


A link to his page and more photographs : http://www.ludimaginary.net/index-english.html