My character is a kid named Robert. He is trying to survive after being dropped into his own nightmare. He is plagued by these nightmares constantly, and that manifests itself as various monsters in his dreams. I have captured a moment in which he tries to face himself, showing both fear and a feeble bravery. Because of some lighting issues in the studio, I decided to go with a film noir style lighting. I put one dim light to the front left of my model and one brighter light to the extreme right to try to create a dramatic profile with heavy shadowing. I had to move the camera nearly every shot to attempt to counter the lighting issues. I didn’t use any props or makeup, so luckily that was a non-issue for me. In Photoshop, I changed the saturation and hue levels of the photo and cropped out some minor issues to create a more dramatic, film noir-esque photo.

In the end, the biggest challenge I faced by far was trying to adjust everything to make up for the weak lighting. I really struggled in creating a photo I felt both conveyed my message and looked visually interesting with my lighting issues. Almost all of the photos were completely black once I moved everything into photoshop, so I had to work with about 3 pictures that had some kind of lighting I could salvage.

I learned that a single picture can tell as great of a story as an entire book. In one picture, you can have a story that changes it's meaning for every person that sees it. A character portrait captures a character's emotion, his or her entire life in a single second. I learned how to enhance that in photoshop and show a character's depth with filtering and saturation changes.