Critique

After the critique on Thursday, I came away with a better understanding of a good self portrait, and what to change about mine. There was some interesting shadows on my face in my first self portrait, which show the shape of the camera. Without doing too much, it might be cool to emphasize the shadow in photoshop. Also, the self portrait with my legs walking away is a cool photo, in my opinion, but from what Priscilla said it doesn't seem to show much about who I am or give very much emotion. We talked a lot about portraying emotion through our self portraits, and I think that is something I need to work on. I was nervous about that before because I didn't want them to seem "Myspace-like". But I think now I have a better understanding of how to go about that. Along with emotion, symbolism is also something I should consider. For instance, water has a lot of symbolism and there is a lot that one can do with water to make a portrait interesting. The way one interacts with the surroundings also adds for an interesting narrative. This weekend I took more pictures and tried to play with the idea of interacting with the space I was in.

I also never even thought of putting something where I would be standing in the picture to get the focus and composition in the right place, and then jump in at the last second. I tried that this weekend and it made things much easier! :)