Editing Process.

Editing Process.

For my response to the final major project and my chosen themes of portraiture, self-portraiture, and documentary photography, I decided to focus the majority of my editing processes on my uses of the formal elements of lighting, shapes, tones, and colour in order to create a series of self-portraiture and found imagery photographs within my home environment. This would link to my research into the contemporary and historical photographers such as Del LaGrace Volcano, Catherine Opie, Lia Clay Miller, and Claude Cahun whose works also focus on the theme of portraiture, and sometimes self-portraiture photography whilst also focusing on their use of colour, lighting, tones, and the use of studio and external backgrounds to emphasize their sitter within the image.

A lot of my editing processes and techniques for this series of photographic responses will mostly be
digital through the use of Adobe Photoshop. However, I intend to keep the majority of my editing techniques simple just by using the ‘Clone Stamp’ tool to remove any unwanted objects/details from the background that could potentially distract the attention away from my chosen sitter, in this case, myself. I also used the ‘Dodge’, ‘Burn’ and ‘Levels’ tools on Photoshop in order to edit and emphasize the lighting, shadows, and highlights within my photographs. I wanted to use a very minimal editing style for this photo series as I wanted it to be a true and genuine documentation of my life growing up and learning to accept myself and experiences I had as a Transgender male, focusing on both the before and after coming out to the people I knew. I wanted these images to be very raw and candid in a sense with no visual or editing/manipulations that would distract attention away from my chosen themes of focus and from the sitter and the way that they are presented and expressing their gender within the image.