Today’s Post by Joe Farace
We can still be sexy and vibrant, fashionable, classy, and fly until the day we die! — Tina Knowles
I’ve always held that the best way to improve your portraiture is practice. Make sure you photograph something—anything!—each week so you get to the point where you don’t have to think about how to operate your gear.
The following suggestions are hardly secrets and you may already know all of this but it might be tucked into the back of your mind, languishing and waiting to be jogged. Here’s that jog:
New things inspire me. It can be a new camera, new lens or just a new place to make photographs. While traveling around, I look for locations that can serve as a location for a portrait session. You can even go looking for portrait locations on purpose, which is how I found Hidden Mesa Open Space located not far from my home.
How I made this photograph: I photographed the famous Internet model Maria Cedar next to a log barn that’s located in the Hidden Mesa Open Space. The camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 at 45mm. Exposure was 1/100 sec at f/5.6 and ISO 200 with an exposure compensation of plus one-third stop. After a few test shots, I used the camera’s built-in flash as fill. Portrait was retouched using my normal retouching techniques—Photoshop’s Clone Stamp and Healing Brush—before applying the Dynamic Skin Softener filter from Color Efex and then selectively erasing some of the filter’s layer before applying the plug-in’s Glamour Glow filter.
One of my earliest mentors advised me to work with as few light control devices as possible. I try to do that because the less time spent working with gear, the more time I can spend putting my subject at ease. Most of my outdoor portraiture is done with natural light using either a speedlight or a reflector for fill. When working alone, having a reflector on a light stand is useful but if an assistant is available I prefer using them to move the reflector rather than walking back to the light stand to make an adjustment.
It’s so easy to become so enthralled by the person you’re photographing, especially with a dynamic model like Ms. Cedar, that you forget about the background. There’s a Farace’s Law that says, “if you watch the background, the foreground will take care of itself.”
Nowhere is this more true that in making available light portraits. Busy, ugly backgrounds can be thrown out of focus with longer lenses and wider apertures. And I think this image proves that Micro Four-thirds can have shallow depth-of-field for portraits, even with apertures of f/5.6. It’s also not uncommon to have to physically clean up an outdoor site before you can make a portrait. While you can always digitally remove beer cans and fast food wrappers, taking the time to clean up the trash in an area before you make an outdoor portrait leaves it clean for everybody else too.
If you’re interested in learning how I shoot available light glamour and boudoir portraits, please pick up a copy of Available Light Glamour Photography which is available new from Amazon.com for $29.95 or used starting around twenty bucks, as I write this. The Kindle version is $28.45 for those preferring a digital format.