Hidden Identities

For this assignment, the technique I used is referred to as "painting with light". When I first heard of this expression, I didn't know what that definition entailed, for I had never seen an example of the technque, nor had I ever tried it. However, when I discovered what the technique was and how to accomplish it, I was thrilled to try it out. I needed some sort of a light source that, if executed properly, would work the same way as a paint brush would in a painting. I used the flash of a cellphone to successfully "paint with light". For the first photo, as you can see, I "painted" the addition of the pitchfork and horns onto my subject to symbolize a devil. I achieved the red hue of the pitchfork by covering the flash with my finger so the light had to travel through my finger in order to be captured by the camera, which then successfully transformed from white light to red, which added an ideal component to a devil. I then released my finger off the light source to "paint" the horns, so the full light could be captured by the camera. I also did this because, by letting the full light source be shown, it becomes a larger "stroke", which casted a slight shadow or blur on the person's face so that the person wasn't the subject of the photo, but the actual devil figure was. For the second photograph, I "painted on" wings and a halo to my model to represent an angel. As I did for the horns in the devil photograph, I allowed the full light source to be flashed onto the camera, in order to achieve the bright and powerful look I wanted for this photograph. My inspiration and motive for these photographs was "hidden identities"; in other words, what kind of person someone really is. I am fascinated by human emotions, passions, actions and histories, which is what derived my inspiration for these photographs. If only in real life you could turn out the lights and have it be this obvious to the human eye whether someone truly is a bad person (devil), or a good person (angel).  For my photographs, I used a Canon Rebel T2i with an 18-55 mm lens, a shutter speed of 15 seconds, and an aperture of f22.