DAY 4: A Dummy Target

"Un Estafermo"

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An Estafermo it's a rotating doll, with a shield in the left hand and a strap with balls or pouches. [According to RAE] (https://dirae.es/palabras/estafermo) In English, we can found something similar called A Dummy Target.

This has been one of the most interesting days because the result came from practice and experimentation, and that always seems super valuable and enriching to me. At first I wanted to follow the image of the dummy target with the shield, keeping the search for self-portrait and femininity, I wanted to represent that shield for us can be our knowledge and starting from that idea, interesting things happened.

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I used the burst shooting technique to acquire movement in the image, keeping my ideas in the turning object that some way or another is punched by something. I didn't like the result with the books and all the knowledge thing at all, and now that I look more closely at these photos, I think I could see it on my face.

I started to go around the house and when I do this I usually look for something that attracts my attention in those spaces, some atmosphere or light, trying to follow the Golden Hour aesthetics of the photographs, I usually look for some interesting Light entry, this one I got it resting in the bed of one of the rooms of my apartment, I started to make some tests with clothes in the bed also in burst shooting, until I dared to undress, the object of struggle, that punch, would no longer be a foreign object, but would be the vulnerability of the naked female body.

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The decision to take Long Exposure photography was almost instinctive. It is a method that I have used before for self-portraits and achieves a very interesting depth in the photographs, especially because it's not something that we see in professional photography perfectly delineated, is the image deforming the known forms and leaving a free interpretation to the viewer of what it sees, the way in which the long exposure captures the movement has always seemed beautiful to me, and is a technique that I hope to continue working.

Here it was also a lot of work to experiment, putting the camera in several places, until I managed to place the camera inside the bathroom drawer of this room, getting a double frame that is a connotation to intimacy and self-absorption.

I think that each of these self-portraits work separately and the experience of making them makes me like them even more, while I made more photos I understood how I should move, for how long to maintain a position and how fast the gestures could be, the self-portrait is not only a photographic act is also a great personal exploration, and I missed a lot expressing it with my body and capturing it with my camera.

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These days I have been struggling with Lightroom to achieve the effect I want, not having lights or a very good lens I've tried to take photographs in hours and places where I can have a good amount of light that allows me to play with the RAW format of photography and exploit its capabilities, this has been one of the results of development color that I liked most and is what ends more close to the idea of a strong, metallic figure and I think this contrasts perfectly with the smoothness and movement that generate long exposures.

You can see the Final Result here But the one a show you here where really close to made it also. PD: The final one it's a solid artistic nude

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Thanks for reading!

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