Assignment 7: Night and Color

Jasmine Mann

Set up:

I put the camera on a tripod and had it face toward a white wall. I then, after much trial and error, adjusted the tripod so that when I stood, It would only show me from my nose to my collar bone. I painted my lips with very red, very high gloss lipstick and then put myself between the camera and the wall and took a picture of myself.

Taking the Photograph.

Having a tripod pod allowed me to turn down the ISO and increase the Shutter speed because I didn't have to worry about camera shake and noise is always bad. Because flash makes things look harsh I decided not to use it. I also used a large aperture because I didn't need to have the wall in back of me in focus. Because the lipstick was so high gloss the camera's auto focus would more often than not focus on my lip, achieving the desired focus.

Because I didn't have a remote I had to be somewhat close to the camera to trigger it. I decided to use 22mm focal length because I wanted my bust to frame the picture. I found that using 18mm showed too much of my body and using 24mm would only show my neck so 22mm was a happy medium.

In Photoshop

For everything in the picture except the lip I applied a hue/sat adjustment layer to make it a low-sat blue. I also removed some unattractive top lip hair. I adjusted the contrast so that the wall would be lighter and the body darker.

For the lips, I used another curves layer to exaggerate the lip's shininess. The lips were already pretty shiny because of the lipsticks I used but I wanted it to be very obvious. I then use a Hue/Sat layer to and rotated the hue so that it would be golden in color. The result is lips that look like they are made of gold.

I then applied a gradient overlay on the whole image. The gradient forms a diagonal and is whitest near the lips and darker else where. This draws attention to the lips. The image has also been cropped so that my body frames the pictures. I was tempted to add a fake logo on the bottom left but decided against it.