Following the feedback from the group crit session, I decided to include some more personal elements in the compositions, and to do this I felt like experimenting with some nondescript self-portraiture. I had contemplated adding more overt self-portraiture earlier in the project but decided against it as it would be too direct and not as suggestive or elusive as I wanted the project to be. Finding a balance then I decided to try out taking pictures of myself but not of my portrait, I decided to focus on pictures of my hands as these are often quite personal to each of us and are something that we can perceive of ourselves through our own perspective without the distortion of using things like a mirror or a camera to do so. As someone who also wears quite signature rings these also end up becoming part of an identifiable aspect of myself and so I decided to use a mixture of ringed and ring-less images of my hands.
To take these portraits I used my 5DII mounted on a high tripod aiming down and set to a 2sec timer, then I positioned myself beneath the camera with an A3 sketchpad on my lap as a plain backdrop and then took a series of images of my hands in various positions, some single and some with both hands in the shot and then repeated the process once I had put on my rings. I also decided to then experiment with adding some other assets, namely that of details of my anti-anxiety medication, sertraline. I used the expansive insert that comes with the medication with every and all possible side-effects and the various other warnings and legal information that comes with such medications, using these provided quite an interesting level of detail when combined with my hands and rings, with some words and sentences being legible and offering an insight into the psyche of the photographer as self-portraiture.
When it came to processing the images I again stuck to black and white as per my other assets to keep visual cohesion between them, and I experimented with having some assets quite light and sharply detailed with high clarity and medium to low contrast and others to go much darker, punchier and more obscure with high contrast, high shadows, low highlights, and reduced clarity. Having a wide variety of edits within these assets gave me a good base of images to select from when adding them to my compositions. I found that the assets with rings and the additional background material from the sertraline info sheets were the strongest assets as they provided an element of the photographer on multiple levels and were also the most interesting shots visually with the various elements within them.
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