Transformation_

I started my portrait with absolutely no idea what to do. But I mean, can you blame me? I just took a picture of my friend out of the blue one day as a homework assignment, and as random as it was, I did make sure I paid attention to the lighting of his original portrait. He was kind of reluctant to have me take his picture, so I told him he didn't have to face the camera and figured that I would work with it.

So this was the original photo:

Through some thinking, I was able to turn it into this:

I really didn't have a concept in mind when I started out with this project, so I kind of just stared at the original portrait - for a very long time. I noticed after a while that my friend was dark in this photo, so I figured that I could place him in a dark environment and that he would not be altered. I thought that he could maybe be in some dark forest, so I searched the web to find an image of a rather dark forest. I came across the one I did since I thought that he could be facing the light in the image, as if he were trying to find a way out. So as I worked, my concept pretty much came out of working - it went from absolutely nothing to finding the light in a rather hopeless situation. I feel that my transformation was a success after playing around with photoshop to make the background more cohesive with the portrait. Maybe some more work could be done to make the background look a little better, but overall I think it looks alright by my standards, which can be low at times.