Traditonal portrait photography

For my first bit of developments I started some studio based work where I had my model replicate an advert I had seen which I thought helped make an effective photo.

This was taking the idea of traditional portraiture with using the studio lighting and the model doing a typically happy expression. This was shot at home where I unfortunately didn't have a studio set up so i had to improvise with a lamp which created a spot light effect - I shone this onto the models face to light it up and create the almost glow around the outline of the subject. I had my camera set to black and white and actually took the image in black and white but it came out greyer than I expected, however I felt I thought the images were effective in greyscale and if I wanted to go through with the images being black and white, this is something i would achieve with photoshop. 

I tried to keep the model in the same position throughout the photos to keep consistency throughout the shoot with the aim of putting the images together as a set of 4 so they would fit better together and create a better effective picture.

When editing the photos, I decided to but them together to make a collage to play around with the presentation of the images. After putting them together, i edited them as a whole image to make sure all the pictures are the same colour and texture and this is my outcome..

I increased the contrast of the images and played increased the highlights of the image to keep the illuminated outline of the boy and the contrast between his clothing and background.

The thing that I feel didn't work well in this image was that fact that in the last photograph of the set, more of his head is chopped off than the rest - this interrupts the consistency of the photograph and takes away from the outcome.

I went back and re-edited the images to amend the last image to bring it in line with the rest of the photographs.

However now they are all inline with each other, it has created a diagonal line through the over all photograph which makes the eye follow it through which I feel is a bit of a distraction.