A struggle of being a student photographer in isolation is the fact that you are extremely limited to what you can photograph and who you can work with. As the majority of my project is based around portraiture, I knew that this would be a problem for me. To try to resolve the issue, I have tried photographing myself, and photographing my sister who I live with. While both outcomes were successful, I still wanted to experiment further. I wanted to try working with a male subject again. The only man I live with is my dad, and he did not want to be photographed. However, as my friends know I study photography, many of them sent me short videos created on Instagram/TikTok of people doing a photoshoot through FaceTime. As the issue of not having models is not just affecting me, many other photographers have shown themselves video calling their models and photographing what they see on their screens. I loved this idea straight away, as it suits the concept of creating something new and working differently despite the bad situations. I also thought that this would be a fun thing to try. To do more research on how to efficiently take pictures like these, I watched a few YouTube videos showing photographers video calling their models. The photographers explained what they were doing and showed the process of it. Watching the videos helped to give me inspiration of poses and how I should take the pictures. However, due to this being a fairly new concept, there were not many videos or much explanation about how to photograph a male model. I thought the best way for me to learn was by testing the idea out. These are the videos which I watched for inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWqu3lniDG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhiGR5Pc16A I video called my boyfriend who has previously been a model for me in this project. He was using the webcam on his laptop. To take the pictures, I used both my phone camera and my DSLR to see which worked better. I used my phone camera so I could very quickly take pictures. I then also used my DSLR to see if it improved the quality of the image, which did not seem to make much difference. As the internet connection was bad, the image which I could see of him on my screen was very bad quality and pixelated. However, I carried on shooting and I tried to work with the resources I have. I found this shoot very difficult to do for the following reasons. I could not control the lighting we were working with like I usually can. It was a sunny day so we tried to make the most out of the natural light. It was also difficult to communicate due to the connection being poor. I found it hard to direct him to certain poses and moving the camera a certain way. The background was also an issue, as he is living in student accommodation, there are not many places in which the background would be suitable for a portrait. I tried to just focus on photographing poses and angles which worked best.
Using the images I took, I uploaded them to Photoshop and cropped them all the same size. I found a square crop worked best. I then tried to adjust the contrast and exposure to give the illusion of better quality images. I increased the saturation as they looked too flat, without any dimension. I also tried to reduce the grain/noise of the image. It is clear the end result images were taken from a webcam as they have that look to them. However, I do not think they look too bad. I have a lot of fun doing this shoot, and it was also quite funny to do. I will try shooting with him again in different lighting and different areas of where he lives to see if it improves the look of the images
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