Tagged: portrait photography
Portraits: Steve
On the weekend I had rented a Canon 5D for test photography and video, my friend Steve asked me to take a headshot of him for a forthcoming conference he was attending.
Delighted to do so, we excused ourselves from a social meeting at the BFI bar to take these photos up in the Mezzanine Gallery.
I was unused to the size and controls of the D5, so I decided to eschew my usual manual use for automatic control of image making: this set me free from focus and exposure issues, and allowed me to concentrate on composition.
My main aim was to get both the focus on the eyes and the light in them to feature. While I love a shallow depth of field focus, with more control I would like to have featured more of Steve’s surroundings: the background here looks quite anonymous.
A few minutes later we were done.
Portraits: Marcus
Photographing theatre producer Marcus Bernard was my second attempt at an environmental portrait and this time the weather was on my side.
After our initial chat, we decided to shoot at the the Bunker Theatre, which has sadly since closed. I made a visit a few days before to check the light and agreed on a time to meet up.
The light, bright and sharp, was just the way I like it. I shot Marcus against the light at the entrance at first before heading indoors. We photographed in the bar, the back office and the auditorium itself, but my favourite shot was from the office: the mixture of ambient and practical lighting, along with the clutter and theatre paraphernalia within the room, really worked for me.
Later, Marcus requested one of the images taken outside, which I was happy to provide. I learned a lot about light in this session and I would love to further experiment with this in future.
Portraits: Christmas Lights
My experience with street photography is limited. I like taking street scenes, but I find it difficult to take a portrait of a passer-by. I feel like I have intruded on the subject’s personal space: the few I’ve taken I’ve been loathe to display.
That said, I do love some photographers’ street portraits and I think that I should attempt to take more in my own style. Plucking up the courage to ask someone’s permission to do so would be the first step.
This was the step I took with this portrait. I was with my camera group, taking photos of the West End’s Christmas lights, when I came across this young woman smoking a cigarette. There was something about her calm, away from the busy-ness of the shopping area that surrounded her, that was fascinating so I asked if I could take her photo.
She said yes: I took a few exposures as quickly as I could before thanking her and leaving her to her cigarette.
Looking back, I wish I got this woman’s contact information to send her the final image. It was a pointer to how I could go about street portraiture in future.
While I realised that the street lighting on her face wasn’t satisfactory, an aspect that struck about this image was the woman’s relationship with her surroundings. This made me very interested in environmental portraits, elements of which I’ve tried to bring into my portraiture since.
Portraits: Alistair
Some time ago at my old workplace, I made a habit of taking film photographs of work colleagues.
These snaps found their way to the dark room, where I made prints, the best of which I would give to the colleague as a thank you for letting me photograph them.
After taking his photo at work, I asked my then-colleague Alistair, who is now an actor and educator, to work with me on a portrait session. Since we lived in the same area, we agreed to do the portrait session at my flat.
Relishing the opportunity to really spend time on a portrait session, I tried a number of set-ups, with Alistair sitting, standing and at one point singing around my flat, but in the end I found the most interesting place to shoot was outside in the summer light.
I loved the way the natural light caught the details on Alistair’s face and in his eyes. Making prints afterwards, I spent time on tones and highlights, dodging and burning until I got the representation I was after.
Later I saw a headshot Alistair had made for his acting work by another photographer. The quality was stunning and I was inspired by it. I was determined to take more portraits to get to that standard.
Portraits: Alex
Alex was after a headshot for her blog and website and, having photographed her a number of times before, I was very interested in creating a portrait for a professional’s use.
On an overcast day, we walked to a park nearby her flat and found an ideal backdrop of a flowering bush for the photo session.
What marked this out as a different experience for me was how Alex and I worked out the next pose. Working from the communication aspect of her work, we aimed to shoot Alex in mid-conversation.
I was used to shooting portraits in a landscape frame, so the portrait framing and pose were new experiences for me. When faced with the choice of finalised images, Alex went with the portrait composition.
Burning Details 
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