Shock: A Narrative Character Portrait by Aava Salehi (2015)

My character is a teenage girl named Morgan who has extremely strict parents. One day, Morgan's mom left the house so Morgan sneaks out on a date. When she gets to her date, Morgan and the boy see that the mom is at the same restaurant. The thought of her mom seeing them on their date scares Morgan, causing the boy and her to instantly flee the restaurant to make sure they get back home before the mom. I captured the moment when Morgan slams down the window sill after she crawled back in and turned around to see her mom standing right in front of her.

I chose to get the shot as a close up so the viewer could really feel the fear in Morgan's eyes when she saw her mom. The black background helped me capture the time aspect of the moment which was at night. Using this background also helped minimize the editing I needed to do in Photoshop because there were no creases in the backdrop that I needed to fix. I wanted to have direct light hitting her face to show that she had just been caught. In my eyes, this mimicked headlights on a police car when they catch a criminal. I faced some issues with lighting when I tried changing up the angles. Every time I changed the angle, I would have to change the light settings as well to make sure the light was hitting the correct part of her face, making it hard to switch back amongst angles. I solved this problem by keeping track of the settings for each of the three lights so I could quickly come back to an angle and know what my light settings were supposed to be.