Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows [that] he is being photographed.”—Richard Avedon
The above quote demonstrates that the late Richard Avedon was not only was a genius behind the camera but was perceptive about his photographs and what they represented. The truth is that a portrait seldom represents reality. Instead it’s an image of a person at a specific point in time that though posing and retouching presents an idealized version of someone who knows they’re being photographed.
Take posing for example: The point of any pose is not just to look natural, although that certainly is an objective for some photographers but perhaps it’s also to tell a story and there are many ways you can pursue that goal.
Some photographers prefer to keep their posing subtle, while others are not so restrained. One possibly apocryphal story is that Yousuf Karsh’s famous portrait of Winston Churchill was made during a two-minute session in which Karsh gently and politely removed the ever-present cigar from Churchill’s mouth to produce the determined look you see in the finished photograph.
No matter how you achieve the pose, it all starts with experience, observation along with communication with the subject. In all of the various posts that I’ve made here over the years about posing, I try to help with the latter two aspects but the first one is up to you because as the punchline to an old joke goes, the best way to get to Carnegie Hall is “practice, practice, practice.”
How I made this shot: I created this sexy, I think anyway, portrait of stand-up comedian Denise Winkleman in my home studio to show that you can funny and sexy at the same time. And one of my guiding principles about creating Intimate portraits like this is making sure the subject is comfortable in the moment. Or as Halle Berry, once said, “Sexiness is a state of mind – a comfortable state of being. It’s about loving yourself in your most unlovable moments.”
To light this portrait of Denise I used a Paul C. Buff DigiBee monolight with Plume Ltd Wafer softbox placed at camera right, an Alien Bee monolight with 16 x 30-inch Westcott Apollo Strip soft box located at camera left and another Digibee with a 48-inch Dynalite Quad Square black/silver umbrella placed in the back, camera left corner of my studio. The camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens (at 45mm) with an exposure of 1/125 sec at f/8 and ISO 200. The above image is a classic Joe Farace-style studio shot where the subject is placed in a three-quarter pose, looks directly at the camera but as is atypical for me, she has a nice smile. (Hey, she’s a comedian.)
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The original title of my book Posing for Portrait and Glamour Photography was The ABC’s of Portrait Posing. On this blog there are lots of posts about posing. Type “posing” the Search box to find appropriate posts. If you want something more lasting, take a look at my book that’s available from Amazon for $29.02, with used copies around twenty bucks as I write this, The Kindle version is $26.71 for those who prefer a digital format.