OK, it’s Oscar Wilde quote time again. My Sunday series on outdoor portraiture continues today with a portrait of Shea, who I photographed the first time at a group model shoot in Phoenix. Arizona. A year later I was able to photograph her again at another group shoot, which is when the featured image was made.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself.”― Oscar Wilde
I was talking with a photographer/friend who’s located on the East Coast and he showed me some recent portraits he’d made. I was surprised to see that, for the most part, his portraits were headshots. Really, really great-looking headshots but headshots nonetheless, which got me to thinking…
what is a portrait?
According to the Oxford Languages Dictionary, a portrait is “a painting, drawing, photograph, or engraving of a person, especially one depicting only the face or head and shoulders.” So maybe my New York friend had it right? On the other hand, the images that my Colorado friend Cliff Lawson creates are more like environmental portraits that show more than the subject’s face but also the kinds of things the subject is interested in and often depicts them participating in those activities. Headshots they are not
Somewhere in any search for the kind of inspiration that’s sometimes needed to create the ultimate portrait, you might encounter photographs that are conceptual in nature and these, while seemingly about the subject, more often than not reveal more about the photographer than you might ordinarily think. Richard Avedon once said,“ My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.”
So a portrait is just a picture of a person who knows they’re being photographed but more importantly as Oscar Wilde wisely pointed out, it’s also a picture of the person making the photograph. My friend Rick Sammon likes to say, “the camera looks both ways” and I think he’s right about that. What my portraits, like today’s featured image, say about me, I can only wonder…
How I made this shot: I photographed Shea, one of my most popular models, at a group model shoot in Arizona. You can read more about her in this post. The portrait was made using a Canon EOS 10D with an EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM lens (at 105mm.) The lens has been discontinued but you can pick up used and even new copies from many sources, including KEH Camera and Amazon. A Canon 420EX speedlite was used as fill although the captured image file could have used a little more. The exposure was 1/160 sec at f/5.6 and ISO 200. The image was slightly underexposed and to fix it I used the technique described in “Correcting Underexposed Portraits.” Next the image was tweaked with Vivenza before adding a layer of the Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex.
So what is a portrait? It is a picture of a person and it can be anything you like and maybe something they like as well.
Special Note: Every time I feature a portrait of the beautiful Shea on this blog I get emails from photographers who would like to contact her. I’m sorry but I do not have any of this information. I wish I did and consider myself lucky to have been able to work with her twice in the past.
If you’re interested in learning how I shoot available light glamour portraits, please pick up a copy of Available Light Glamour Photography which features an image or two of Shea in Chapter 7. The book is available new from Amazon.com for $29.95 or used starting around twenty bucks, as I write this. The Kindle version is $22.49 for those preferring a digital format.