portrait photography

I have started to finalise my ideas I began by focusing on portraits so I looked at an artist named 'Aaron Smith' who shoots portraits of skaters and people at the skatepark, when Smith shoots his portraits the people in the photos have the key features which make up a skater stereo type, for example he shot a portrait of a girl with dyed hair and earrings as well as a famous skater with earrings and a nose piercing, which are key factors of her personality, I like the style in which Smith shoots in as he uses nice composition and his photos say a lot which i want to show in my final images. I wanted to recreate Smiths work by using the same sort of composition he did in both my final portrait images and the response to his work, he uses rule of thirds well which is something I want to incorporate as well as juxtapositions and contradictions.

 Above you can see on the left is Smiths work and on the right is my response, I tried to capture the same elements Smith did in his photos I did this by taking my 35mm film camera to a skatepark in London where I devoted a day to shooting portraits of people at the skatepark and above is the photo I liked the most and which I thought best represented Smith's work, I tried to include contradictions by having the persons hat as black and the shirt as white, I also changed the photo to black and white in photoshop as well as changing the levels so that the photo came out better and looked sharper.


I then went on to photographing another portrait of one of the skaters sitting down eating an ice lolly, this was also shot on the 35mm camera and I liked the shot because it also resembled Smiths work. I decided not to edit this photo as I think it looked its best as the original, I also included the skaters shoes which are worn out and beaten which is a aspect I wanted to include in this photo. Photo shown below.

After shooting those portraits I continued on developing in portrait shooting, so I set up a photo shoot with my friend and began to shoot. From this shoot I wanted to get a set of photos of my female friend holding a skateboard, I also tried to focus on the contrast of personality as the girl is well dressed and doesn't look like your average skater 

Here is one of the raw images on the left, however I ended up taking quite a few as you can see below, in regards of composition I again stuck to the rule of thirds as I wanted the subject very central and I also like how the greens of the skateboard match with the trees. I also tried to focus on lighting so I could practise for when I shoot my final images. Below you will also see I created a contact sheet so I was able to select my favourite images.