Candid Cinema Snapshot

Create one vertical 9:16 image: a candid flash snapshot of the man in the attached photo, taken by a friend outside a single-screen cinema just after the night show.

Identity first. He is the same person as in the attached photo: keep his facial structure, eyes, brows, nose, lips, jaw, beard growth, skin tone, age and natural asymmetry, and the texture and volume of his hair. Take only who he is from that photo; its pose, clothes, expression and light do not carry over.

The moment. He has walked past the camera and is still moving away when a friend calls his name. His body keeps going, one foot mid-step, and his head turns back over his left shoulder, about three-quarters to the camera, chin level. His eyes find the lens. A smile is just starting, the look of someone who heard his name; not a pose and not a smirk. His arms swing naturally at his sides, hands relaxed and partly out of frame.

Framed from the waist up, so his face is large in the upper-middle of the frame and only his near shoulder and a little of his back show. He sits slightly off-centre, and the frame is a little tilted, as if the friend lifted the camera in a hurry.

He wears an ordinary casual shirt for a night out, sleeves folded twice, slightly creased from sitting, with no accessories worth noticing.

Light. One small on-camera flash, blunt and frontal: it flattens him a little, puts a thin hard shadow behind his jaw and collar, and lets the background fall away darker than the eye would see it. Behind him, soft and secondary: ordinary people spilling out of a worn single-screen theatre, tube lights, a hand-painted poster wall reduced to blurred colour blocks, bikes along the kerb.

A real compact-camera photograph: natural skin texture, slight grain, no retouching. One main person; no readable text, letters or logos anywhere.