Shoot Three - Work Record

For shoot three, I decided to expend on the idea of social stigma regarding mental health issues, which is something I had touched on in my last shoot. For the shoot, I planned to use the studio again, taking a very minimalist approach for it like my previous shoot. I decided I was going to write labels that are often given to people with mental disorders on small pieces of paper that I would get people to hold up over their mouths. I hoped to get a cross a message that people with mental disorders are often labelled negatively and that your mental disorder doesn't define you.

Here is an image that I feel went well in my shoot.

This image I feel achieved what I wanted. personally, I felt that the choice of background worked as it added to the dark and cynical mood of the images. Also, the image was well exposed, meaning the background was dark as I had planned and my subject's face is fully lit and visible so that the label she is too. I also like this particular word on the paper out of all of the ones I wrote, as it is the perfect length  to cover someones mouth and is one of the most common labels for people with a mental disorder, particularly obsessive compulsive disorders. Additionally, The positioning and body language of my subject I feel was right for this image, as they are holding the paper so their fingers don't obscure the writing on it. They are also framed well, being placed in the centre of the frame.

This is an image from my shoot that I feel didn't go very well. While I like the positioning of the paper over his mouth, I feel the image was underexposed. There is not enough light on my subject's face, which means the paper he's holding over his mouth is not as visible as I had liked it to be. Also due to the lack of light, there is a pinkish tone to his face which I feel removes some of his facial details and some of his face is not visible Also, I feel like the piece of paper I used for my subject was too big and covered too much of his face. The fact the picture is underexposed also means that parts of his jacket blends into the background as it is the same colour. If I were to edit this image, it may create problems which I would have to fix by adjusting brightness and levels. Finally, I wasn't very happy with the reflection in his glasses, as you can tell that there were people behind the camera watching.

For my next shoot, I plan to continue with the idea of documenting social stigma of mental health issues, however, I have only shot in the studio so far so I would like to implement this idea into a location based shoot.