My Sunday series about making outdoor portraits continues today with some images of Dottie, who I photographed during a group model shoot in Northern Colorado. On that same day, Mary also photographed her and, as usual, the styles of our images were vastly different, in fact there is a night and day difference…
Today’s Post by Joe Farace, with Mary Farace
Style is a reflection of your attitude and your personality— Shawn Ashmore
Back in the early eighties, a portrait photographer whose work I respected advised me to work with as few light control devices as possible. He believed the less time that you spent fiddling with lighting gear, the more time you can spend putting a subject at ease, allowing you to make better portraits.
Portrait lighting sources have four major characteristics: color, direction, quantity, and quality. No matter which style of lighting you chose, it’s also governed by one important rule: The closer a light source is to the subject the softer it is; the further away the light source is, the harder it becomes. More than that, all light behaves in accordance with the Inverse Square Rule: The power of a light is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. If you double the distance between a portrait subject and light source, it illuminates a surface area four times greater than before. To put it another way, the subject now has one quarter— not half—as much light falling on it.
Case(s) in point
Mary and I separately photographed Dottie at a group model shoot held in Northern Colorado. In today’s post, I’ll show you what Mary and I did during the same day-long shoot, with the same model but at different times of day and with different approaches to portraiture and props.
How I Made this Portrait: It’s obvious that Mary and I took a completely different way of photographing Dottie, starting with the fact that I photographed her at night. When working with new or aspiring models, I also like using props because it gives them something to interact with. What could be better than a shiny motorcycle that belonged to the host of the model shoot.
This portrait of Dottie was captured with a Canon EOS 5D Mark I with a EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens (at 41mm) with an exposure of 1/15 sec. at f/5.6 and ISO 400. A 550EX speedlight was used as the main light along with some colored floodlights at camera left that added some ambience and color to the image. The image was lightly retouched and Vivenza was used to punch up the colors and topped it off with the Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex.
During a shoot, I typically make a sequence of images not just one and hope for the best. Each pose in a sequence is slightly different while I refine the pose a little each time, rather than making radical changes. Unless nothing works and then I just start over. I call this technique Shooting through a Pose. This approach can also serve another purpose. In this case, I copied her face from another (vertical) image in the sequence using a technique I call Cut and Paste Portraiture.
How Mary Made this Portrait: Mary made this available light portrait using an Olympus Evolt E-300 Four-Thirds system (not Micro Four-thirds) DSLR with a Zuiko Digital 40-150mm f/3.5-4.5 lens at 68mm (136mm equivalent.) The exposure was 1/160 second at f/4.0 and ISO 200 with fill flash from the camera’s pop-up flash.
This camera used Kodak’s KAF-8300CE FFT-CCD sensor that’s now beloved by shooters of older digital cameras because they believe it produces the most filmic and cinematic look, although nobody talked about this aspect of the sensor at the time (2004) it was being sold.
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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 many posts about posing. Use the Search box in the upper right-hand corner and type “posing” to find appropriate posts. If you want something more lasting, take a look at my book that’s available new from Amazon for $29.95. The Kindle version is $28.45 for those who prefer a digital format.