Portrait PhotographyFor my senior thesis, I looked into what makes good portrait photography and I learned a lot of new things. For my project, I decided to create an online portfolio for myself so that I can easily access my pictures if I need them for a job. The portfolio also insures that I will always have my pictures and they can't be, somehow, destroyed. I chose to do an online portfolio because I can jsut send a link to people if they would like to see my work, instead of paying a bunch of money to have to pictures printed. Photography is more of a hobby of mine rather than a profession, and my portfolio just lets me keep track of all of my work, as well as all of my memories.
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The reason I chose this topic is because I love photography and I want to be a portrait photographer. My favorite portion of the Senior Project was the project it self. It was my favorite because I was actually able to build a portfolio for myself. My biggest takeaway would be that I don’t want to pursue photography as a career. I think it’s more of a hobby of mine and I have actually changed what I am going to study in college. The most difficult aspect was senior thesis and trying to stay on top of things and not procrastinate because I do that a lot.
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TED Talk"Creating Good Portrait Photography"
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Senior thesis paper
What are the aspects of creating good portrait photography?
Abstract
Everywhere you look one thing is common, photographs. People not only use photography to document events and milestones, they use to enhance the beauty of their surroundings. From pictures of quiet country streams and cute animals to family photographs, almost every public space has some kind of photograph as decoration. Photography is much more than taking simple pictures, as a career a photographer must know technical information about lighting, posing, choosing subjects and framing shots. Equipment care is another facet of photography that requires technical knowledge beyond what the amateur needs. Modern photography has emerged as more than a hobby; it is a profitable and exciting career. Each strategy that a photographer uses creates their own touch and passion that floods all over the photograph. The emotional connection nearly goes unnoticed for when the picture is well photographed and the viewers experience the sensation in their subconscious. This is one of the most powerful tools that a photographer holds in their hands. If one can become a master of manipulating how the photo affects its viewers, the said photographer can potentially exercise people’s minds and thoughts with one click of a button. Portrait photography is one of the most common forms of photography. Portraiture is the art of capturing a subject, a group of people or an individual, in which the facial features and facial expressions are made predominant. Every picture taken is unique and is has its own characteristics given to it by its taker. Much like every individual person, each photo has a story and an attitude. All these distinctive qualities are given to the picture by the photographer with a particular purpose.
12th Grade Humanities
Animas High School
5 March 2018
Part I: Introduction
Portrait Photography is more than just taking a picture of somebody. It is an artistic representation of a person’s attitude. Portraiture is all about the subject’s face. The goal of a photographer is to carefully take a photograph of a person’s distinguishing facial features, while also capturing their attitude, identity and personality. A portrait is carefully planned. A candid photo would not be considered a portrait. This does not mean that a portrait can’t appear candid. It most definitely can. A portrait should be planned out with the subject. The outfit, background, props, subject’s position and the angle of the photo should be prepared for the actual photo shoot. If someone asked you to take a photo of them and highlight who they are in in that photo, you wouldn’t just quickly snap a picture of them, would you? You would have to think about the positioning of that person, what props you are going to use, and what background would work the best for that specific person. Portraiture is so much more than taking a picture of somebody’s face and posting it on social media to show people what a great job you did. A portrait is about capturing the essence of a person’s identity and attitude that they would want to share with the rest of the world. With that being said, portrait photographers have pretty big jobs. Learning to work with clients and using a good camera to get the perfect exposure is all about hard work and knowing a few simple tips and tricks. Portraiture is an art form that fascinates and intrigues us on a very deep and personal level. It is the most desired of all of the art forms. Portraiture has been around since the earliest days and has been a popular style for hundreds of years before that with painters. We desire to look at faces, especially other people’s faces. But why are we so drawn to looking at other people’s faces? Well, there are a few explanations to this. But first, a brief history.
Part II: History and Background
Photography was invented in 1839 by Louis Daguerre, who presented to concept to the French Academy of Sciences. Later that same year, what is considered to be the ‘first photographic self-portrait’ was produced by Robert Cornelius. In 2013, the Oxford Dictionaries announced their word of the year to be “selfie”, which they define as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” Although many people thought this concept was fairly new, the ‘selfie’ itself is far from being a modern occurrence. The photographic self-portrait was surprisingly common in the very early days of the exploration and invention of photography. The image was taken in 1839 by Robert Cornelius, a chemist and photography enthusiast from Philadelphia. On the back of the image was written, “The first light picture ever taken. 1839”. The next year, portrait photography studios started to become a thing. These studios were not a huge success at first, because the public was not too sure exactly how they should feel about it. Many of the portrait photographers wanted to make a name for themselves by ultimately trying to get pictures of famous people such as Charles Dickens and Abraham Lincoln. The invention of photography is such an amazing achievement in the mid-nineteenth century. So much so that it’s almost equivalent to the invention of the internet.The impact of photography is huge in portraiture. There is a correlation between “reality” and “likeness”, and the combination of those two in portraiture guarantees its success. In 1840, a daguerreotype was priced at $30, which is the equivalent of about 3 months worth of wages for an average person. Portraits were rare and precious investments for many people. For others, they were lucky if they could even have one portrait made of themselves. Every U.S. city possessed portrait studios. The buildings were made to have specific rooms with skylights, for natural light, and dark rooms for developing the portraits. Plates that were used for exposure by early photographers, were prepared by assistants and the photographers cycled through multiple clients with a standardized pose for the exposure of the photograph. The assistants would then develop the plates so that they were ready to be picked up shortly after the session. The price of each portrait dropped to 20-25 cents due to the efficiency of the process of taking the portraits. Unfortunately, the portraits did not show individuality of the subjects. It was just a simple picture of a person.
In the United States, Mathew Brady, one of the earliest known photographers, at age 16, moved to New York where he met a portrait painter by the name of William Page. He later became Page’s student. In 1839, Page and Brady traveled to Albany, New York, and then to New York City. There Brady continued to study not only with Page, but Page’s former teacher, Samuel F. B. Morse. Brady’s involvement was limited to just manufacturing the leather cases that were going to hold the daguerreotypes, at first. When Morse opened a studio and started to offer classes, Brady became one of his very first students at the studio. In 1844, Brady opened his very own studio in New York. By 1845, he exhibited his portraits of some of the most famous Americans such as Daniel Webster, an American politician who represented Massachusetts and New Hampshire the United States House of Representatives, and Edgar Allan Poe, an American writer, editor and literary critic. Brady later opened another studio in Washington, D.C. His early portraiture were daguerreotypes and he soon received many awards for his amazing work. The Gallery of Illustrious Americans was a portrait collection of contemporary figures that was produced by Brady in 1850. Six years later, Brady had an ad placed in the New York Herald, that stated he would offer to produce “photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes.”.
Part III: Essentials
There are many different aspects to creating good portrait photography. You have to think about the technical stuff such as the exposure and focus, as well as the nontechnical stuff such as composition and working with a living breathing subject. There are many pieces to doing a portrait, and it’s not easy. Being a photographer and learning how to capture a portrait professionally is one of the most important skills that I can develop. Good portrait photographers are well liked, are usually sought out on a very high level, and are highly respected. It is a great way to take a hobby and make it into a career. If portrait photography were as easy as picking up a camera and pointing it at someone and telling them to say “Cheese!” we would all be doing it. But it’s not that easy and there are a ton of small elements that go into creating this art. From choosing the right gear, to figuring out what a good background will be for your subject. From posing your model, to adjusting the exposure and contrast. To mastering light and polishing images in photoshop (but not too much to where the image looks photoshopped). You have to be well informed about all of it to master portraiture.
Lighting Patterns: Split, Loop, Rembrandt, Butterfly/Glamour
Split lighting is a very uncommon lighting technique used in portrait photography. It creates a sense of drama to the portrait. It is a way to add a unique look and feel to the portrait. Split lighting is exactly what it sounds like; lighting that is split right down the middle of your subject’s face. The ratio of light and dark is evenly divided over the subject. One of the things that makes split lighting to great and easy to use is that you only need one single light to achieve this look. As Digital Photo Pro points out, “To achieve a split-lighting look, simply set up your source at your subject’s head height at about 90 degrees to the side. Fine-tune the light position to get the line between shadow and highlight where you want it”. To get a more soft, less harsh split light, use a reflector. A reflector is a piece of glass, metal, or other material that is used to reflect light. You can see reflectors on the back of motorcycles and bikes, on the vests of construction workers and flaggers, but the one place that they are used the most, and seen the least, is in portrait photography, or any type of photography for that matter.
Another lighting technique that is used in portrait photography is loop lighting. Loop lighting is a very common technique that is used by most portrait photographers. It is easy to create and like split lighting, it is very easy to achieve by using a single light. This type of lighting creates a shadow that loops down and around just underneath the subjects nose. Loop lighting creates the illusion that the subject’s bone structure is more defined. “Loop lighting shows the contours of the face without emphasizing unflattering elements like wrinkles blemishes or scars” (Digital Photo Pro). To achieve this lighting, your light source needs to be angled above the subject, but downward and to the side towards the subject. As with split lighting, for a less harsh loop effect, use a reflector to bounce the light back to the other side of the subject’s face.
The word ‘rembrandt’ comes from the dutch draughtsman, painter and printmaker, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. He is considered to be one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art and the most important Dutch art in history. Rembrandt lighting is very common in portrait photography and many portrait photographers use this type of lighting in most of their pictures. The idea of this type of lighting is to create a small upside down triangle of light on either of the subject’s cheeks that is opposite of the light source. This type of lighting is often used in Hollywood portraits and is very flattering on the subject. Again, this kind of lighting is created by using a single light source that is placed to the side of the subject, and just above eye level, but behind them just enough so that the nose creates the shadow that makes the top of the triangle. Like most lighting techniques, you can use a reflector to soften the harshness of the lighting for a more flattering and less intense and dramatic look.
Butterfly lighting, or glamour lighting, is one of the oldest techniques used in portrait photography. The reason it is called butterfly lighting is because of the shadow that this technique creates under the nose of your subject; it looks like a butterfly. To get this look, the light source should be placed above the subjects head, and you should take the picture from underneath the light. If you take the picture from anywhere else than under the light, you will not get the butterfly effect. You will end up with some other sort of light source. This lighting pattern can be tiny and unnoticable, or it can be slightly bigger and more noticable depending on how high your light source is. Butterfly lighting brings life to the picture and adds depth as well. It fills in and lightens the shadows and wrinkles on the face of your subject, but not too much to the point where it doesn’t look real. This type of lighting can actually be created in photoshop, if you would like to spend hours trying to figure out how to do it. But it is easier to spend 5 minutes to set up any kind of light source and use that instead. Butterfly lighting works with any face and improves the quality of any portrait.
Lighting Ratio:
Ratio is a math term. It is a comparison of one thing to another. The definition from the dictionary states that a ratio is, “the quantitative relation between two amounts showing the number of times one value contains or is contained within the other”. When using lighting ratios, you are supposed to measure the light that falls on one side, and compare it to the shadow that appears on the other side of the subjects face. There is a very simple way to figure out the lighting ratio, and that is simply with the camera. It is very accurate and very easy to use. The meter is in your camera, and it is a reflective style, which means that it takes a measurement of the light that is being reflected off of your subject. Light is measured in photography by what is called ‘f-stops’. The aperture dial on my camera goes up in ⅓ of a stop increments. Aperture is, “a space through which light passes in an optical or photographic instrument, especially the variable opening by which light enters a camera”. The full stops for aperture are f1, f1.4, f2, f2.8, f4, f5.6, f8, etc. The way that I remember all of these numbers is by just remembering 1 and 1.4. All of the other stops are doubled from those numbers, and a few of them are rounded to the nearest whole number. Shutter speeds are also typical with “stops”. The full stops are at: 1 second, ½ second, ¼ second, ⅛ second, etc. These are also easy to remember because the numbers are just doubled, again, with some of those numbers rounded to the nearest whole number. Each full stop is double the amount of light over the previous light. If you are shooting at f2 and want to shoot at f11, you will have to triple the amount of light in the picture to get one more stop. Diane Berkenfeld states that “Most people aren't thinking about composition when they look at photos, but they do know when a photo is pleasing to look at even if they don't know why”. By knowing the shutter speed and f-stops, figuring out how to create and measure ratios will be much easier.
Quality of light:
What does ‘Quality of light’ mean exactly? Quantity of light is how much light is given. But the quality of light is how good it is. What is this ‘good light’ that so many photographers talk about? How do you measure if the light is good or bad? If you have a small light source, the lighting will be harsh. If you have a large light source, the lighting will be softer. However, the quality is also affected by how far or how close the light source is to the subject. For example, if a large light source is too close to the subject, it is large compared to their face. If you move that light source away from the subject, the relative size of the light changes. The sun is a good example. The sun is 92.96 million miles away from Earth. The radius of the sun is about 432, 169 miles. It is a giant burning ball of fire. When we look at it from Earth, it appears very small in the sky. It’s blinding, but appears to be small from where we currently are. Because of our relative distance from the sun, it is a small light source. Harsh lighting can be created by small light sources like; the sun, a lightbulb, a flashlight, a candle, or even the flash on your phone. Harsh light is defined as strong with well defined shadows and a high contrast. Harsh lighting shows deep, dark shadows, and bright highlights or whites. Soft lighting is created by using a large light source. A few of these light sources can be the sky on a somewhat cloudy day, large studio light such as softboxes, or a reflector used to bounce light. Soft lighting is, obviously, the opposite of harsh lighting. It is defined as soft and not so harsh shadows and low contrast.
There is no determination as to which type of light to use. It solely depends on what kind of look you want to create, and what kind of story you want to tell within your image. If the goal is to make your portrait more dramatic, use harsh lighting. “Side-lighting can create mood, backlighting and silhouetting your subject to hide their features can be powerful” says Darren Rowse, a blogger, speaker, consultant and founder of several blogs including digital-photography-school.com. If the goal is to make your subject more flattering and create a softer mood, use soft lighting.
Lens Selection:
One of the most important pieces in doing portrait photography, is choosing the lens. Not only does it change the appearance of your subject, it changes the background as well. A few good kinds of lenses to use in portrait photography are normal, wide-angle and telephoto lenses. Normal lenses give the same perspective to the human eye. The normal lens does not show any distortion within the image. The normal lens is simple. You basically take a picture of what you see, without any light enhancements, filters, or distortions. Telephoto lenses are most commonly used by fashion photographers and portrait photographers. Photographers use this kind of lens because it compresses their perspective and their ability to focus more on the model and less on the background. Although telephoto lenses are on the expensive side, you can still buy telephoto attachments for your normal lens and trick the image as well as the viewer. Wide-angle lenses are better for environmental portraits. Environmental portraits are portraits taken in the subject’s usual environment. These environments can include their home or place of work. These portraits really focus in on the subject’s life and their surroundings. Wide-angle lenses are not good for close up portraits because they will distort the subject’s face. That’s why they are better for environmental portraits because you are far enough away from the subject that nothing should look distorted.
Background:
Choosing the right background is the most crucial thing the think about when doing portrait photography. Yes, portraits photography is all about the subject, but if you don’t have the right background, it won’t be about the subject anymore. It will be about how terrible your background is. The background of a portrait needs to make sense with the portrait, and it doesn’t need to distract the viewer from the subject. Contrast, bright colors, sharpness and bright areas are what can be distracting to viewers. The eye is naturally attracted to the brightest and sharpest areas of the image. Getting your subject away from the background and being able to get the background out of focus is a great way to grab the viewer's attention. The background can make or break your image. The background should not be too distracting and should focus mainly on the subject.
Posing:
While all of the different lighting techniques, lens and background choosing are a huge part of creating good portrait photography, the most important thing is posing the subject. Getting your subject to feel comfortable and flattering at the same time, is tricky. A lot of people, myself included, get really nervous and shy in front of cameras and tend to not know what to do when a camera is being pointed at them. The subject tends to look at the photographer for guidance on how to stand, sit, hold their body, position their hands, turn their heads, etc. As a photographer, it’s easier for the subject to just be themselves, and when we tell the subject that, the response is always, ‘How do I be myself?”. The subject needs to be relaxed and they need to feel comfortable. “Taking someone’s portrait is always a disruptive and often very awkward event. Everyone has their default portrait pose. The role of the photographer is to push beyond, to find that mysterious intimate moment that only a camera can freeze” (Liz Hingley). A good way to do this is to tell the subject to play with their hair, spin, or crack a joke to them. Make them laugh. The mission of any photographer is to create stunning imagery. Being confident in telling your subject how to pose, if it doesn’t work or it doesn’t look good, move on and try something else. Experimenting and talking is the key to portrait photography.
Part IV: Discussions and Conclusions
Portrait photography can be one of the most challenging types of photography. Capturing the beautiful photo that appears natural and shows the subjects personality is a skill that requires a lot of practice, but also a lot of patience. Portraiture is all about capturing someone’s character rather than producing a photo with good exposure and contrast. Portrait photography focuses on people. And only people. Hence the word ‘portrait’. A good portrait will tell a story about that person and really show their character. A good way to really capture who the subject is, is to take pictures of them when they aren’t looking or when they won’t notice. This provides the ‘natural’ look of a person. The subject needs to relax, and once they have finally relaxed and feel comfortable, that is when the photographer will capture the most ‘telling’ shots. The case in portrait photography is to tell, not show.
Choosing a location that suits your subject is major. A studio setting with some sort of plain background is very popular in portrait photography. It’s perfect for getting the subject by themselves and isolating them and not having any sort of distracting background to take the viewers eyes away from the subjects face. Photographing the subject in a place that they feel most comfortable adds character to the image. Whatever background is going to be chosen for the subject, the key thing to always remember is that the main focus of the picture is your subject, not the place. A wide aperture lens sends the picture out of focus and keeps the subject the main part of the frame and in focus.
When it comes to lighting in portrait photography, you want to be able to rely on more than just the flash on your camera. Shooting inside of a studio means that you should use a combination of lights that are not attached or built into the camera, and reflectors to light the subject. Get slightly more illumination on one side of the subject’s face than the other. If access to a studio is not an option, use a more natural light. Although shadows will be a problem, using a reflector will solve that issue. Just position the reflector on the opposite side of the light source, and the light will bounce back, filling in the harsh shadows to make them softer.
So what makes a good portrait? Joerg Colberg says, “I believe many things go into the creation of a good image. But sometimes, nothing at all, except luck and patience”. While lighting and composition are very important, the best photographs are those that create a real connection between the subject and the viewer. “Portraits reveal a desire for human connection,” Steve McCurry writes. “A desire so strong that people who know they will never see me again open themselves to the camera, all in the hope that at the other end someone will be watching, someone who will laugh or suffer with them”. A good portrait is the window into the life of the subject. There are at least two people in the making of a good portrait photograph; the photographer and the subject. Neither of them have complete control over one another. The photographer captures the essence that makes the person who they are. This is what makes portraiture so compelling- the fact that something so small and simple as a handheld machine can create so much feeling and emotion. When I am looking for a good photograph or trying to explain what a good photograph is, that is what I strive to look for. Emotion and a story. I want the image to have more questions than answers. I want it to provide a mirror for my reflection. To make me look again and again. To grow with me as I grow older. To feel passionate. Cameras are machines that capture every moment. They are a means to an end and the humanity that we see in photographs, is the result of human endeavor.