My Sunday Series on Available Light Portraiture continues today a theme I started last week about mixing available light with electronic flash from a speedlight. The featured portrait is of Krystyne, who I photographed at a group model shoot in Arizona.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.”— Ralph Hattersley
If you are not familiar with the writing of Ralph Hattersley (1921-2000), please take a look at this post that includes information about one of Mr. Hattersley’s books that was a major influence on me as a young photographer.
At the end of each year, I used to write an article about some of the current trends in photography for the print edition of Shutterbug. Since this option no longer available to me, I decided to write a post about a subsets of some trends I’ve noticed in social meida specifically as it applies to portraiture.
A Look at Recent Trends
What follows isn’t based on any scientific or statistical analysis of images on social media but instead is a = personal overview of the style of portraits I see these days, especially on Instagram, the last social media platform that I;m involved in. (Follow me there at @joefarace.) It may well be that these trends are much narrower than I suspect because it only reflects the kind of photographs that are posted on social media while thousands of other kinds of images are being made by portrait photographers every day who are too busy shooting to spend time on social media. But here are four trends I see all the time and my take on them
Big Heads. All the cool kids are shooting really close to their subjects filling the frame with their subject’s faces. This was a craze in PPA competition prints back in the 1980’s and was known as the “big head” look. Now it’s back for everybody that was too young or not born yet to notice that fad from back in the “Me Decade.” I’m ambivalent about this trend and believe that, it too, will pass. Like a lot of trends I also think it’s highly subject dependent. Sometime “the big head” works and sometimes it doesn’t and it isn’t something you can force on all subjects. If you want to give it a try, shoot a loose crop with have a high megapixel camera you can use Photoshop’s cropping tool.
Ennui, according to one dictionary definition, is a “feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement.” This style of portrait features mostly young women who look like they are being locked up and held hostage by the photographer in a leaky basement and could care less about being photographed. The old catch phrase is that “the lights are on but nobody’s home” seems to apply but the cause could be as simple as the photographer is not talking to their subjects.
Stuff “Growing out of people’s heads” is photography 101, yet I constantly see otherwise moderately successful portraits ruined by not initially seeing distracting objects in the background with something sprouting out of a subject’s noggin. Some photographers initially don’t see it on the LCD panel, when they could quickly make a change in camera position to eliminate it. I am not talking about a juxtaposition of an interesting background and a very different foreground.
How I Made this Portrait: I photographed Krystyne in Phoenix as part of a group model shoot. The camera used was a Canon EOS D60 with my then go-to outdoor portrait lens the EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM lens at 58mm. The exposure was 1/100 sec at f/5.6 and ISO 200 with a 420EX speedlight with Sto-Fen Omni-Bounce diffuser fitted used as fill. This was the first of three shots I made of this pose, which proves that sometimes your first shot is the best.
Underexposed images is more of a technical detail and maybe I’m too sensitive about this subject but some photographers seem to think the best way to show a dark film noir mood is by underexposing the portrait. Nope. When you underexpose a portrait you may make it darker but you also make it flatter and dull. To successfully work with shadows also means the portrait should have some highlights too.
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Several photographs of Pam appear in my book Available Light Glamour Photography that’s available from Amazon with used copies of the book for $49.94 as I write this. The Kindle version is $27.83 for those preferring a digital format.