In my experiments with lighting a portrait, I wanted to explore how one could "sculpt" the face through lights and shadows. In traditional portraiture, light is extremely important in rendering the emotion and mood of a sketch or painting; surely, the same must be true in a photograph. With my love for low-light photography in mind, I decided to deliberately highlight and obscure the face in order to push certain features of the face to tell a unique story. Although both images use harsh and colorful lights to carve out the features of the face, the quality of the light and the way that it is positioned in each respective photograph allows for different readings of the face.
The first image is much more surrealistic and mysterious in the sense that the face exists in stark contrast against the black background. I was intentional with what colors hit each part of the face (red on the mouth, blue on the eye, etc), and this way of taking a portrait was extremely fun to work with. It felt like painting with lights in real time.
The second image is lit in a more conventional way, but it still retains its dreamy quality. The lights in the second image are significantly softer and diffused (thanks to a few layers of Kleenex over a desk lamp), and the broad lighting creates a focal point out of the subject's right lens. Overall, this shoot was really enjoyable because playing with artificial light is my favorite thing to do in photography. This idea of painting on the face with light is something I would be very interested in exploring in a future project.
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