I'm not usually a portrait or still-life photographer, so it's been very interesting to see how I've thought about obtaining these images, from planning shoots, to evaluating through contact sheet annotations, to the end results. I'm a quiet person generally, so going out and asking people if I could take a portrait of them because I liked their outfit or their hair for example, was really tricky and stressful for me because I just wasn't used to doing it.

 

For both my portrait images of the woman working out, I used photoshop to play around with a combination of adjustments, filters and effects. For the black and white image, I simply made in black and white before using the curves adjustment to alter the contrast between the black and the white to suit what felt right. For the other image, you might think I did the same, but adjusted the colour balance too, but instead I used the hue/saturation adjustment. I made sure that the ‘colorize’ box was ticked, with a low saturation and the hue set to a yellow-green shade of colour to get the effect of ‘Lith photography’.

 

For the necklace, I used the box it came in, positioned on a window ledge in direct sunlight coming in on the right. This was after a few trial-and-error positions, I discovered that the best angle for the light was from one side rather than the back or front. The flower arrangement had many vibrant, warm colours and different shapes all around, so I chose the side with the most variety of colour to make sure that they were all in frame. I had the ‘vibrant’ filter set on my camera to see how it would come out without editing.