Starting Point

The theme for this years exam paper is flaws, perfection, ideals or compromises. After doing some research on the ideas I could do for my work, as a starting point for my unit 4 photography work I have decided to go with the themes flaws, perfection and ideals. I quite liked the idea of doing portraiture as I have not done so yet across my other units and I thought it would help me widen my skills. Within portraiture I wanted to study beauty and what we consider to be flaws on the skin, a perfect complexion or ideal features as a beginning idea. I have decided not to study compromises as well as I do not have many ideas that I would be able to expand upon. One secondary image that inspired my choice of idea was the photo below by Stanislav Istratov. 

Title: Beauty Portrait Doronina 8161
Artist: Stanislav Istratov
Date: Unknown

In this image the model can be considered perfect because of all of her features, however the image has been edited with a tool such as Photoshop to manipulate the image to create this ideal image. What makes the perfect image is that her eyebrows are a nice shape which suit her face and there are no hairs out of place, the skin as been softened, her lips are big and plump and make up has been used to enhance the model which I find has also been applied symmetrically 
with not too much or too little which has also made her eyes a lot more dominant. Artificial lighting has also been used in the image to highlight certain features and darken the right side of the photo which in turn highlights the rest of the image even more. This image could also be considered flawed due to their being too much make up which is actually morphing what the model actually looks like as some people would consider the natural look to be perfect. It is all down to the individual, what they think about themselves and what they consider to be perfect beauty.