Final Piece Development

I began by creating my brain scans and adding my own writing to them then printing them onto acetate, after this I stuck them to a window and had my model press her/his face onto the window within the frame of the acetate from the other side of the window, I had my model stand outside while I took the photo from the inside to begin with because I thought it would have narrowed the chance of glare from the natural light outside. The light was too bright, it was a horrible faded white colour, my model and brain scan were no longer crisp, they looked faded and blurred because of the light so I needed to stop so much light from getting in.

After messing around with the settings on my camera nothing seemed to be getting rid of the glare and the excessive lighting so I thought I could have an assistant hold a blanket behind the model from the outside to stop so much light from getting in, I chose to use a white sheet so my brain scan would still show up against it, this proved to be a bad idea as it seemed to even out the glare yet bring even more overall light to the image. 

To stop any lighting from inside getting to the window I made a blockage with the curtain by sticking it up to the window with tape...it looks very home made and unstable (it was) but it did seem to work slightly. 

By this point I started to panic a little as I really thought using natural light would work and I didn't consider any of these implications so I then realized that artificial light was the way forward. I suggested bringing the work inside and using the glass from a picture frame yet the risk of it braking because of how fragile some of them can be was playing on my mind. I wouldn't allow my model to press her face against fragile glass so I had to think my way around that too. I suggested that we just held the glass up next to her face as opposed to her pressing it against it and the result gave me some hope as to how I was going to pursue this idea. 

To produce the image above and others alike I needed an assistant to hold the glass in front of the models face and this just wasn't practical as my assistant wasn't a real photography assistant, it was in fact my very busy dad! I also wasn't too keen on the background, too much of it is showing, it confuses the image, it becomes a maze and you don't know where to look so I came up with the idea of my model lying down on the floor and having the glass resting on her face, this way I had a plain floor background, I wasn't relying on an assistant to hold the glass still and gravity pulled the glass down to her face so she didn't have to pull it which may have resulted in breaking. 

A mixture of natural and artificial light balanced the lighting in the room so I had minimal glare but the glare I do have doesn't add to the image in a bad way, in my opinion that is anyway because I think it gives it a tired, uncomfortable look which is what a sufferer from OCD goes through on a daily basis, this image captures these feelings giving the viewer a little experience of what it might be like to suffer from OCD themselves. 

My next step is to create the other 3 of my brain scans then deciding how to make the images look more creative without taking away from what they're about. I'm thinking of sticking small stickers on the models face for this image to represent her feelings of thinking she's contaminated as opposed to the things around her.