Posts Tagged ‘portraits’
Portrait Shooting: A Few Smart Ideas
If you’re a portraits specialist, you’re in luck: Jason Weddington offers imaginative tips on framing, composing and posing for portraits in one of those unusual articles that’s short on text but high on ideas and ‘meat’.
5 Tips for Improving Your Portrait Photography starts off by advising you to ‘frame tight’ when shooting faces. Ho-hum, what portrait specialist doesn’t know that? But wait— Weddington wants you to frame so tight that you slice off the top of your subject’s head. He says that that maximizes the tug of your subject’s eyes, referring to it as a covert Hollywood trick. Clever!
Talk about eyes, another technique is to get your subject to position the eyes so that the irises are centred from the camera’s perspective. He’s right. This technique will usually result in a portrait that one would describe as ‘hypnotic’ or ‘arresting’; one that makes an immediate ‘connection’ with the viewer. Better yet: Weddington advises that you try to generate catchlights in the eyes and explains how you can do so.
Here’s another tip: let your model stay in the dark for a few minutes. That’ll dilate her pupils. Then open the lights and work fast, whether you use flash, lamps or natural lighting. The opened-up pupils will result in those desirable catchlights and will also contribute to a ‘hypnotic’ or ‘arresting’ face.
“Have you ever heard a subject complain ‘I don’t know what to do with my hands?’,” writes Weddington. Actually, even when they don’t say that, they often behave that way! The solution is to put hands to work and Weddington suggests using “a prop.” A pen is often used.
Another idea would be to go prop-less and ask your subject to pose in a way one sees so often and is so natural, yet seldom photographed: fingers idly drumming on a tabletop or other surface? Goes well with a blank or happy expression! Want a pensive expression? Goes like salt and pepper with clasped hands or someone looking at her palms, fingers curled.
Weddington goes on to describe two further ideas, one to “let kids run wild” and another very valuable one to “shoot into the sun.” That gives you the backlighting and highlights that you don’t get with the sun over your shoulder. Weddington doesn’t mention that you may need a reflector or fill-flash if you use this technique.
This article is complemented by some very nice images that get across each tip and set you up for your own photographs using these ideas.
The ‘Dark’ of Crime and the ‘Light’ of Glamour: Gordon Parks
Farm Security Administration photo by Gordon Parks of Mrs. Ella Watson with three grandchildren and her adopted daughter. Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Where photography intersects race relations, Gordon Parks is a name that stands out, especially in America. Two days back Duke University remembered this multi-talented man with a lecture and slideshow. Parks, among other things, was also one of LIFE magazine’s premier photographers.
His oeuvre is varied, so much so that The Gordon Parks Foundation website has divided his work into eight categories. Though most of his photographs are (rightfully) celebrated, Parks is primarily known for documenting the Civil Rights Movement and the issues of race that sparked and surrounded it. What’s more, he artistically documented the reality of the day – check out this photo of a black woman and child in animated conversation under a sign (of sorts) in the segregated Deep South.
While this photo of Malcolm X documents the age, this one is a gem of composition, framing, cropping, and capturing of a moment.
Parks also documented the lives of the poor – here’s a touching photograph of a Parisian busker. Parks’s photographs of the impoverished do get a little harrowing, as may be seen in this photo of a malnourished little ghetto-dwelling Carioca.
Do you want to comprehend the bleakness of incarceration? Click here to see an expository and painterly image. Parks’s other images in the Crime category are progressively darker, featuring drugs, addicts, and prisons but here’s one expressive masterpiece that would adorn any exhibition.
If Parks’s searing images of Poverty and Crime are too much for you, veer off to the Fashion or Portraits-Children categories. It’s hard to believe that the same photographer who specialized in the seamy and sorrowful side of life also shot this restrained and classy image of the high life – beautifully posed, lit, and arranged. As for this one, it is high glamour portraiture at its finest – from the man who shot drug addicts!
Parks was even a time traveller: shooting in 1948, he somehow achieved an image that screams ‘Art Deco’ from the Roaring Twenties!
Though some lovely images are linked to above, would you believe that some of Parks’s finest are not included – click on Workers to view first-rate documentary ‘street shooting’. All credit to Duke University for commemorating the life of this wonderful photographer.
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