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Relapse + Recovery

www.facebook.com/candiceericaphotography /// www.candiceerica.com/

 

For my Photography 3 class, we were assigned the challenge "faceless self portrait". And because I do self portrait photography, I was like "HELL Yes! Challenge Accepted!"

 

But once I put some thought into the challenge, I knew I couldn't submit the typical pretty photograph. In fact, I made it a point to do just the opposite. I wanted a conceptual image; and with that, I decided to use the available light alone.

 

Like most photographers, I am not a huge fan of a photo with noise. And we all strive to obtain as much possible detail that our camera sensors can handle haha. However, I wanted the photo to be gritty. I wanted to make the audience almost feel dirty: uncomfortable.

 

My camera settings and metadata aren't available because there are some special stuffs I did to this photo. I not only wanted to produce a narrative, but it was important to me to add some visual distortion.

 

I shot this whole photo with the Canon 16-35 f/2.8L on the Canon 6d at 1200 iso, and stitched six images together in Photoshop CS6 to achieve the crazy barrel distortion I wanted. I mean, I know this speaks for itself, but the distortion was a visual hyperbole in correlation with the mental distortion a person with an eating disorder is experiencing.

 

For me, I look at this image and I feel uncomfortable. I almost hate it. It is not traditional. It is not perfect and clean. But.... it means I did my job as a photographer. I really feel I got my message across, and the more I look at it, I start to appreciate what I produced. It took me a little bit to stitch all the images by hand (especially with images all shot at 16mm) ...

 

I ended up winning my class competition for the Faceless Self Portrait, so that felt pretty good. I can say I definitely made everyone in my class uncomfortable, as well as myself (since now everyone can say they have seen me in my underwear haha).

 

 

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Uploaded on September 16, 2014
Taken on September 3, 2014