Posts tagged with "portrait"

Aaron and Ryan: Portrait Test

Thumbnail: Aaron and Ryan portrait

Thumbnail: Aaron and Ryan portrait

Aaron came over with Ryan for break­fast one morn­ing, and it gave me a chance to use them as mod­els to try some of the tech­niques I learned from Sid when I was in New Hampshire. I still had to do some work in Photoshop to keep the mid­point where I want­ed, but it was still quite min­i­mal com­pared to my work with colour late­ly. This type of por­trai­ture is very dif­fer­ent from what I nor­mal­ly do, where instead of using an out-of-focus back­ground to make the sub­ject stand out, I’m using the con­trast of light.

I turned on Chicken Run to keep Ryan occu­pied while we ate, and Aaron kept get­ting dis­tract­ed by it as much as he did. For a moment, I could­n’t tell if it was the son who took after the father, or vice ver­sa.

Tatiana

Chest bone

Thumbnail: Three quarter body
Thumbnail: Bust
Thumbnail: Legs
Thumbnail: Hand
Thumbnail: Torso

Lying down

Some por­traits of Tatiana. As a per­son into voyeurism (more specif­i­cal­ly, on the end being observed), she’s more com­fort­able with her clothes off than on. I love work­ing with peo­ple who are com­fort­able with their bod­ies. You get total cre­ative free­dom, instead of the frus­tra­tion of hav­ing to walk on eggshells, lest you offend a mod­el’s sen­si­bil­i­ties.

I’ve dis­cov­ered that when doing nude pho­tog­ra­phy, you need to open up the aper­ture so that a greater por­tion of the per­son is in focus than in con­ven­tion­al por­traits. If you focus on only the eyes, you lose the nudi­ty and it becomes a dis­trac­tion. If you focus on naked­ness, you lose the eyes and it becomes vul­gar.

Arjmand

Close up

Thumbnail: Laughing
Thumbnail: Scratching Dolly
Thumbnail: Looking back
Thumbnail: Side
Thumbnail: Straight on

Photographing peo­ple with dark­er skin is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent than cap­tur­ing those with fair­er skin. You don’t wor­ry so much about the colour tones dur­ing shoot as after, when you’re post-pro­cess­ing the pho­tos.

I also find that, in gen­er­al, girls are nat­ur­al posers. They’ll change posi­tions on their own ini­tia­tive and play with the cam­era, which is very dif­fer­ent from guys, who will just stand there until you give them some sort of direc­tion. Each has their own advan­tages, as I can feed off the cre­ativ­i­ty of a mod­el who wants to try dif­fer­ent things, but also work well with those who will be pos­ing dolls for me.