Portraits, Box 16, 1946

The vast majority of the negatives in box 16 are portraits and I believe this the result of a class assignment.

There are portraits indoors and outdoors, some of the outdoors portraits utilize a reflector in an attempt to enhance facial lighting.

There are a total of four young ladies in the picture, I don’t have names for the faces. This may come later after studying the different yearbooks from the College of the Pacific in the late 1940’s.

Joel clearly engaged in an exercise in angles and expression.

In the above image one can clearly spot the reflector used to direct sunlight to the young woman’s face. There’s someone assisting. Goal of these reflectors is to light the underside of the face to obtain a good facial contrast. In this case, the nose and cheekbones cause a distracting shadow. The particular reflector in use, is too reflective for the purpose. A white sheet of paper would have done a better job, held a bit further away from the body. The use of reflectors is definitely a learning curve.

In the image below, the reflector is casting a lot of flare in Joel’s lens, the angle however is an improvement.

Joel is trying out different angles on his subject.

Last images are exercises to frame two people in an image.

The last images reads quite nice and is a fitting end to this 12 negative series.

Next blog post we’ll look at the odds and ends in this box.

Cheers !