Black and White Photo Assignment 4

The fourth and final assignment for Black and White photography was Environmental Portraits. And environmental portrait is an image of a person where the other stuff in the image tells you about the person. After doing earlier assignments I had decided I really liked hands being photographed up close and I have a friend who is a Sign Language Interpreter. I figured she was a perfect subject because I would be able to photograph her hands and tell you about her career. I decided to do my whole assignment like that. I wanted to photograph just hands doing something a person does. Of course the person who is a sign language interpreter was unavailable to photograph but it was my inspiration for the assignment. This was also the first time I really shot a class assignment with a aver-arcing theme. I have tied my images together in previous assignments but this time I shot the assignment as a unified theme. 

This image is of Jen. She is a teacher so I thought about what made her a teacher. I wanted something like drawing on a blackboard but school was out for the summer so that was not going to happen. I figured grading would work well. I felt pretty strongly about this image. The lighting is nice and the entire image is almost in focus but the texture of the wood creates a good backdrop. It does not pull away from the image but if you look there is so much there. 

This image is of my friend Bryan. He works in a restaurant so I had to settle for photographing what he likes. Bryan likes poker so I chose to get hands holding cards. I photographed quite a few different poses and was happiest with this one. The image keeps your eye moving around it in circles and the lighting is great.

This image was my self portrait we were required to have. I love the guitar, even if I am bad at playing it, and I thought it would make a nice photograph. I shot it against a black background which could have been done better because the light reflected off of it in the bottom right corner. I think the contrast though is wonderful. The strings light up well against the black neck of the guitar.

This is a man working with cement. The texture of the hand is wonderful. So much detail. I am not completely happy with the image but I can't figure out why. It might be the left edge just barely has the person. I am unhappy about the hand being so far from the camera. My other images were all so close and this one was further away. 

One thing I learned doing this assignment was how hard it can be to photograph people. I am not a very social person so giving directions was hard for me and I need a lot more practice at. I hope to shoot more images of people to force myself into that situation.

When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes.  But when you photograph people in B&W, you photograph their souls!  ~Ted Grant