Portrait Assignment

Portraits and Light

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Motivation

People are possibly the single most interesting subject to photograph. So for this last assignment, you'll be taking all the skills you've learned during the course and taking some portraits. You should think about lighting, backgrounds, depth of field, composition, and color, and you should (tastefully) touch up each photo in Photoshop. By now, many of these skills will come quite naturally to you.

If you find yourself without anyone willing to model for you this week, you can take a self-portrait for any of the requirements, which is an interesting type of photograph, and adds a degree of difficulty.

Similarly to last week, there are also a set of exam-style questions to exercise your understanding of light. This might seem like a lot of work, but we've given you more time than we usually do. This assignment is due Wednesday June 3 at midnight.

Instructions

This week there are five photographic requirements, which are similar to previous weeks, and then some questions on light for you to work through.

Requirements

• Requirement 1: Indoor Traditional Portrait
  Take a portrait of someone using a traditional portait lighting setup as described in lectures (a key light, a fill light, and possibly a background light and accent/rim light). Unless you have some fancy lighting gear of your own, you should take this picture during section.
• Requirement 2: Indoor Natural Light Portrait
  Take a portrait of someone indoors using only non-electric sources of light (a fireplace, candles, the sun, etc). You might want to arrange someone near a window. Think about the light in the same way as for the studio lighting, and comment on how you created a fill light, how you created a key light, etc.
• Requirement 3: Outdoor Available Light Portrait
  Take a portrait of someone outdoors under available lighting only. Comment on what serves as the fill light and key light. If you like, you can also make this one a candid shot, in which the subject is not aware you're taking a photo (or at least appears to not be aware).
• Requirement 4: Flash + Ambient
  Take a portrait which uses a combination of your camera's flash and ambient illumination. Again, comment on what serves as the key light and what serves as the fill light. Remember, you need not point the flash right at the subject - with a small hand-held mirror or white card you can bounce any camera's flash elsewhere.
• Requirement 5: Non-photorealistic Combination
  This requirement is unrelated to portraiture, but we thought it would be fun to do while you're learning about image editing in lectures. Use a combination of photographs to create a single non-photorealistic image in Photoshop. You must use multiple photographs of different subjects (or the same subject from multiple points of view) as source images, and the result must look nonrealistic.