Editing practise

Throughout the holidays I have been practising with my portrait photography skills and how to edit photos. I downloaded an app called 'Afterlight' which is a editing app for photos. I have used this to try and change the way my photos look to appeal to my key demographic. The photos I have taken are from my Ipod with a 'selfie stick' to show that these are my own photos and that I have experimented in my room as much as I can with lighting and camera angles.Below is a tutorial of how to use afterlight which I took some ideas from when editing my photos. I feel that using the 'dust effect' was very effective for my work. I also changed the colouring, the use of shadows, and saturation on my photos to see if that also made any difference.  My favourite part of afterlight is the use of overlapping my photos. I have used these in many different situations,

A person who uses this type of skill is an artist called Jerry Uelsmann who creates dark and strange photographs/pieces of artwork. I have found some pieces of his work to be able to take ideas from which I could include in my magazine to make my magazine more unique. I have used the website cincopa to help show the different photos in a gallery to make the visual more efficient.

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 I could consider some sort of editing skills like this within my magazine, but I do not think it would be appropriate for my main image on the front page. I feel that this could be used when I use thumbnail images on my double page spread or contents page, or if I was to use a themed magazine issue such as Halloween or Valentines.
I took a video on my phone of me trying different settings on one photo to see how it changed. I went across the different effects you could imput on the photo to see which would create a greater effect. I like the idea of black and white, however I could not use this with my magazine as it does not fit in with the Key conventions of my magazine. On the other hand I can change the colouring of my photos and edit them in a different way, maybe include a fade effect of the colour so that there is the use of a coloured photograph as my main image but can make it look less colourful, which helps to make the picture appeal more to this genre. 

I used this photo as I thought this would be challenging to see the difference between the colours and the contrast. However I could see the difference from the white of the wallpaper and the complexion of my skin was changed slightly. Overall I do not think I should adjust or edit my photos very much due to this magazine wanting to look more realistic so the audience feels that we are reliable. Also if it is over edited it will not look as professional, however I feel we do need to change the photos to make them look darker and fitted more to the genre, therefore I can do that adjusting the parts of the photo such as the shadowing and the brightness instead of putting a colour over it.

Finally here are the other photos that I have taken which I can consider on my magazine front cover. I feel that the best photo to use on the front cover at the moment is:  this is because it follows the conventions, portrait, mid shot, has piercings and the symbolic hand gesture for rock. To improve I could include the fake tattoos on my body somewhere and have a more dramatic background to make the picture stand out more. Otherwise I could edit the photo to look better by having an effect or darker picture as the lighting on the right hand side is very bright and does not follow the conventions.

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