Assignment 2

Assignment 2: Sports and Action

Abe Davis: Inner Thoughts 1

This was a shot that I took. It is a single shot and the only way it was modified was with minor cropping (no blurring, no touching the colors).

This shot was very intentional and took many tries to get right. I had a specific image in mind and my own interpretation of what it meant. I invite anyone who might look at it to come up with their own interpretation of what the image means before reading my intentions below. I think there are a lot of valid ways that you could interpret meaning here. It would make me very happy if people would leave comments of what their interpretation is. I also have a couple other variations on this shot in the album.

My intention: The face on the right represents the person. The face on the left represents his inner thoughts. The idea was to show someone being contemplative and suggest what might be going on inside their head. The image can be read left to right or right to left.

I used a very long exposure and two small keychain lights with different color temperatures. I held the blue light in my left hand and the red light in my right. I controlled the amount of blue and red light at each moment in time by changing the distances that I held each light away from my face. I wanted the lighting to gain more red as my expression moved towards more angry.

I first flashed my expression on the right with just the blue light close to my face. Then I shined both lights and traced out an arc with my face, changing my expression as I went.

At the beginning of the arc I held the red light far and the blue light close. As I moved my face I brought the blue light slightly further and the red light significantly closer. Once I got to the expression on the left I held my face still and shined the red light for a few more moments to account for the difference in brightness between the two lights (the blue one was actually much brighter).

The trickiest part was holding my expression and getting the right exposures with each light. The whole thing was kind of like a dance, with movement and timing, that had to be memorized. I have a couple variations on it that were also included in this album.