Portraits - My Initial Idea

When this project began, I quickly got an idea of how I wanted to arrange my final photograph. I've always been very interested in the topic of storytelling so I felt that this project would be a great way to implement storytelling into my work. My very first idea was to have a friend of mine stand and face the camera, looking quite rough and rugged and to also be holding some kind of bat. I also thought to possibly have another person in the background yelling towards the main subject. The angle of the shot would have been from the chest, up and the depth of field would have focused mainly on the subjects face but also have the person behind him in focus too. The reason I liked this idea is because I think it would make the viewer of the photo really question what is going on. Why is the man holding a bat? Why is there someone yelling at him? Why does his facial expression lead us to believe he doesn't care? I enjoy making the viewer think for themselves; I like making people have their own opinion of what's going on in the picture instead of saying exactly what it is and how you should look at it.

After having a meeting with Peter Renn, we started talking about my idea and we picked up on the fact that I prefer photos that are more set up rather than photos that are taken in the moment. After looking into a few different photographers whom Peter thought that I might like, we decided on a final route that I should follow. We decided that my photograph is going to be around the idea of taking shots that are in the moment and try to recreate them so that they look natural when really they are set up completely but at the same time I am also trying to put my own personal spin on them. The way I thought of doing this is for example; say I took a picture of a woman walking her dog in the park, I then would recreate the image, same angles and lighting to the best of my ability but instead of having an actual dog, I would have someone dress like a dog with face paint and fake ears so it is still recreating the original image but this way I can put my own spin on it in a very obvious way. I have taken this picture below as an example, this would be the picture that I try to recreate.

I think having the conversation with Peter really helped develop my idea because although my first initial idea sounded good to me, there wasn't really much I could experiment with whereas with this new idea, I feel as though there are a lot more photographers that I could look at and be influenced by. I also like the fact that it is out of the ordinary and that very few photographers would have done something like this before.