Edward Weston - Frank Sheridan, 1933

This photograph taken by Edward Weston in 1933, is in a way a portrait of a man shown just by his hand smoking a cigarette. Weston worked with a soft focus pictorialist style for a large portion of his career but later decided against this and became a member of the F/64 group. The F/64 group worked with very sharp focused images that had a carefully considered composition. The piece is in black and white and would have been shot on a 8x10 camera. The photograph appears to use natural light from the room, this can be seen because the background is not fully black or fully grey, the grey seems to enter at the top where the light is coming from. The piece is interesting as it shows the subject holding the very last bit of his cigarette, this would probably have been because it took Weston quite a long time to set up his camera. For my photograph i think i would work with digital as i do not have access to an 8x10 camera and if i did i would not be confident using it. I could possibly use a 5x4 camera but that would meant he photograph had to be taken in the studio and i would only have the image on a colour positive which i would not be able to blow up to an A4 size. I think it might be interesting to try and modernise this photograph, using the same content i could take the image using a digital camera. Still only using natural light and keeping the image in black and white, i could try the image with a roll up cigarette but i also think it would be interesting to try and modernise the image more by using an e-cigarette. A large amount of people smoke these now and it would give a more modern feel to this piece rather than it being a direct copy.