Two portraits (large, 500K each)

Explanations below....







Ethical issues - I went to the opening of an exhibition yesterday by a South African artist, Peter Engblom who uses a mixture of photography and other media to produce fine artworks. His body of recent work is the mythological story of a Black Zulu male who travels to Japan in the early part of the 20th Century and meets a Japanese woman. At the opening one of the models was dressed up and I photographed her in situ. In a sense, these portraits have a stylistic look that is not dissimilar from Engblom's work - but as it was a purely informal image taken at the opening rather than a carefully contrived artwork, I guess it's morally sound and perhaps a tribute to his work rather than a copy. We always need to question ourselves, and sometimes image making can be a dilemma.

Technical issues - In case you think the lips and around the eyes are full of artifacts and oversharpening, they aren't. The application of the make-up is thick and full of some peculiar grainy substance in reality; in fact the images are minimally sharpened. The background painting has been partially desaturated to focus the viewer on the portrait.

Shot on a cunningly cool little Coopix 5400 which I picked up last week at a bargain price which makes the later Coolpixes seem very expensive. I think it's a wonderfully made, outstanding little gem of a camera to carry everywhere in my backpack -- excatly for shots like these. I also think that the 5MP prosumer cameras deliver better results in many cases than their bigger 7 and 8 MP brothers. The race for more megapixels is not always the answer in image quality terms....

OK, that's me done !

 

Thanks Gordon...

 

Hi Paul
Thanks for your detailed comments - I've decided I feel fine about it ethically, it was after all just a real life model at an opening who was there to create atmosphere, and it's simply a portrait of her...
Yes, 5MP is for me the prosumer sweet spot - My wife has a Sony V1 which also just gets it right.
Thanks again,
Peter