Self Portrait Research and assessment + Motion assessment Summary  

Simcha G. van Leeuwen 

Claude Cahun was a famous French photographer who was known for her self-portraits. She had a very odd approach to self-portraiture; one I would call very progressive especially for the time period that was very conservative. Her works were in black and white. She would take pictures of herself in various costumes such as vampires, angel and skin heads to name a few.  She would take pictures that showed no clear gender role or static gender role, even changing her name to something gender static. She also did a lot of work with very staged self-portraits and used a style called surrealism which is a style where you create a juxtaposition by using uncommon imagery. You can see this in some of her work that have something uncanny about them and are somewhat eerie because of the objects that are in the picture with her. Several of her photos are takin at face level and focus mainly on her upper body and face. 

 

 

. 

My Self-portrait assessments 

I tried using a tripod at different angles instead of just face level. I wanted them to be from either a lower angle like someone looking up at you or slightly above that way it didn’t just look like someone standing and taking a picture.  I tried incorporating thing I enjoy such as flowers, reading and playing guitar, not necessarily trying to make it the focal point or not but an element. Also tried editing and experimenting with black and white when photos had too much going on in terms of colours. 

 

 

Motion Exercise summary 

 Stop motion I made sure to take the pictures during the day as during the night there wasn’t enough light for the camera. I would put it at a fairly high ISO of 650 around with a shutter speed of 1 over 2000-4000, I tried 1 over 12000 but light was a bit of a problem and I wasn’t really taking pictures of things going fast enough to require such a fast shutter speed. As my pictures were still coming out clear at the lower shutter speeds.  

Blurred motion was done primarily in the evening or at night where if indoors I could control the amount of light. I would use a shutter speed of 1 as I found that was the perfect amount of time to get the blurred effect without having the picture be whitewashed. I also used a very low ISO so that the pictures weren't super whitewashed again.  

Panning was difficult to think of creative thing to photograph.I used the same setting roughly as with blurred. That being a shutter speed of 1 as I found 2 was too long for the types of pictures, I was taking such as birds flying and people walking.  my ISO was very low similar to blurred motion around 100 sometimes even 50. 

 

Reference page 

 https://www.google.com/search?q=claude+cahun&rlz=1C5CHFA_enCA917CA918&sxsrf=ALeKk03PuAcm8qitiqdt523jkURFIy_rAg:1602269527251&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwitgYaQl6jsAhUemHIEHXtUAOkQ_AUoAXoECB8QAw&biw=1440&bih=703

https://mymodernmet.com/famous-self-portrait-photographers/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Cahun