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Photography Portrait Review

Ashleigh Darlington

Aim of ShootI did this shoot for my music magazine as I needed images for a cover, contents page and double page spread. I didn’t take that many images as I just needed 5 images however I took enough to ensure that I would definitely have 6 images that I liked and was able to use.

I wanted sort of posed images for the large images in my magazine but not overly posed and then all the little images I used was quite natural images where they are hugging and laughing. I used and edited 6 images out of the 28 that I took.

Description of ShootTo get these images I borrowed a camera from college and I took all the images inside with a white curtain background. I didn’t take many pictures because I only needed 6 images however if I was to do this project again then I would want to take a lot more images than I have took this time so that I have more images to choose from as most of the 28 images I had took I wasn’t able to use. I didn’t have a proper plan for my shoot, I had an idea for one image and I planned to use this image for my cover but when I actually went to do I didn’t like how the idea came out so I decided to use a different one and this idea was more the models than mine as there was a large photo frame on the floor that my model picked up so we decided to take pictures with that and I really like them ones so I used that as my cover image rather than the one I had planned.

Final cover image Original cover image idea

Contact Sheet

These are all the images I took, although I got 28 images most of them are basically the same, very similar. So I could have done with taking more but I was happy with how some of the images I took came out.

Final ImagesThese are all the images that I liked so I went on to edit them and then I used in my magazine. I chose this images because I thought that these were the ones that fit the best with the genre of my magazine. I thought a lot about the alignment when I was taking these pictures as I was using 2 people I wanted them to be in the centre of the page on most images. With the pictures I took originally I thought that they was a bit dark and dull so with my editing effects I made them brighter as I wanted really bright images so that they would stand out.

Capture Log

Exposure time: 1/60 secondsISO: ISO-640 Aperture: 3.6

Exposure time: 1/60 secondsISO: ISO-450Aperture: 3.6


Exposure time: 1/60 secondsISO: ISO-640 Aperture: 3.6



Editing Effects

Originally this image had a bit too much background in it that I didn’t want and this was the case with most of the images so I started off by cropping it. Then I went on the adjustments menu and changed the brightness and contrast with all the images I made the brightness levels higher than he contrast to make it brighter and after that I just added the auto contrast effect to it to equalise it all. Then I changed the hue/saturation to add a little bit of colour to it and I changed the lightness as well and then the curves I used this as I wanted the background to be more whiter as there was a bit of grey bits and darker bits in it then I wanted the picture to be a bit more brighter.

Rejected Images

These are some of the images I rejected because of particular reasons as I rejected most of the images I took but that’s mainly because they was the same as most of the others I was using or they was blurry. This is also the case with 2 of these images then the problem with the middle one is another thing I encountered a couple of times because I took a lot of pictures when the models weren't ready but I did this to try and get natural looking pictures, but sometimes it didn’t turn out right.