Social Commentary

I have had this awesome idea for teenage drug use for a long time, and finally I was able to use it! I may not be as passionate about it as I am about Abortion and other stuff but I just had to do it. I changed one of my pictures, so the second one isn't my favorite but I had to do it because the other one I chose didn't fit. I did end up changing the picture to one that fits better however I had to do even more work on it to make it look like it fit. This isn't my best work I've decided but I still enjoyed being able to do some of the ideas I've had in my head. The make up isn't good enough it looks too fake, but that comes from the fact that I had so little time with my "models." This whole thing is to show the girl who is dressed in white about resisting temptation. Notice how the girls start to literally climb on top of her. I chose to have her look away for the first photo because I wanted the attention to be first directed to the tempters rather than the tempted. For the rest of the photos had my tempted girl looking at the camera because I wanted to make it look like the observer felt like she was relying on them to save her. The way she looks at you with the deep eyes tells the observer that "this could happen to you," and "are you strong enough?"

The works:

I used that dark red leather chair because I liked the fact that it wasn't black and that it was red. To me this dark red gives a deeper creepiness then another color. I kept the picture very dark with a black background and dark lighting to emphasize the evil of drugs. The dress was easy, I chose white for the girl in the middle because she is pure, she is withstanding temptation and as long as she does she will remain pure. Then I had one girl wear the black, and that was mostly because of her skin and hair color. The black shirt makes her look more dead against her pale skin. The other girl is wearing purple because I didn't want a navy color, it would clash with the darkness, and I felt like purple can be a very dark color, more witchy. The cigarette is fake, which is pretty obvious as well as the smoke. The smoke came from the website http://www.brusheezy.com/ which is a great place to get free brushes for photoshop. For lighting I simply put both of my studio lights on one side. So the the main light was coming from one angle so there would be hard shadows to add to the effect. With one light I had to make sure that the models were mostly facing the lighting so that their faces were still lite up enough to see the make up. Finally as I said earlier the makeup is a disaster, I definitely need more bruise-like colors in there.