Tuesday 18 March 2014

Todays Shoot (Building Facade Faces)

Today I decided to walk around the city and try and find more faces in objects and buildings and photograph them carrying on from the photographs I had taken last week. I tried to show how the subliminal faces in the buildings show emotion but there is no life behind them just shape.Today I shot digital as I needed to zoom into the buildings so I used my 24-120mm lens. I walked down the Bridgewater Canal up Deansgate then to Northern Quarter and back, I walked for a long time not finding anything then near Deansgate I found a square staircase the winds towards the top, I shot the staircase looking up from bottom to top with the top of the staircase in the center. The staircase didn't have anything to do with what I was aiming to photograph but it was very photogenic and had an interesting form. I walked through Northern Quarter not finding anything then back near Oxford Rd I found two compositions that were very interesting. 


This photograph was taken near Oxford Rd and contains what appears to be a face with the dark windows making up the eyes and the entrance representing a mouth. The windows are very reflective so it looks like its eyes are welling up giving the photograph a sad aesthetic. I'm aiming to show that you don't have to be a living creature to have a living aesthetic but unlike a living create it has no feelings and contains no life. I cropped the original photograph significantly so the photograph only contains the face cropping out everything that didn't contribute to it, I also straightened the photograph making sure the vertical lines were perfect. I learned from my conversation with Alan that you need to keep the viewers eye inside the composition so I cropped it tight just focusing on the bare essential piece of the facade. 


The building facade contains another face however shows a different emotion then the previous photograph. The face looks sad due to its down sloping windows that represent a mouth but the face also looks angry due to the black window frame that look like sharp teeth. Like the last photograph I cropped and straightened the composition so its parallel with the side of the frame. 



I edited the photographs in Photoshop cutting out the facial features so you can see which parts of the facade contribute to the face, I left the background white and then filled it red just to experiment with colour. I like the aesthetic of the photographs and they have an interesting idea behind them but I don't feel that they are strong enough to develop so now I'm going to explore onto something different but maybe still focus so shape.