Portrait Photography Paul Willyams APSNZ AFIAP MNZIPP Portrait photography is a wonderful and very accessible genre of photography. No sitting in the freezing cold waiting for a landscape shot to unfold. There are no precious hours to lose, hoping for a glimpse of an easily spooked animal. Your subject is at your bidding, and you can control everything. Well, not everything all the time.
(This is just one reason people portraits and animal portraits should not be judged as one genre.)
But, the variety! Within portrait photography, you have genres such as weddings, babies, formal, street and many styles and treatments. A subject’s pose and expression change continually ̶ the human face has 43 muscles that can all relax or tense independently, giving billions of potential facial expressions. Think about the angle, the tilt of the head, the look in the eyes, the poses, the location, the lighting, and the environment. So, how do I make successful portraits? First, by studying the genre, looking at a wide range of portraits (both photographic and painted), reading up on technical aspects such as colour and texture rendition, experimenting with lighting and trying many posing ideas. And I have shot and processed a lot of images just for practice. That all takes time and more space than permitted to explain it all. Instead, I can give you a few pointers, tips, and things to watch out for. The key to a portrait is expression. That will unlock the emotional response that you want the viewer to experience. Expression is usually in the face and particularly the eyes – the so-called “window to the soul” – but can also be found in the pose and sometimes the environment. In this portrait of a cheeky kea, the expression is provided by the cock of the head (pose), the brightness of the eyes and their direct stare at the viewer. The colour tones and high key background also help. The expression is anthropomorphic – we don’t know what the kea is thinking, but we think we do because it looks like us.
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I immediately look for three things. Focus should usually be on the closer eye (or eyes in this case as they are on the same focal plane). The depth of field is quite small but is enough that the beak is acceptably sharp. The light is even with no disturbing shadows, and exposure is correct, with no blown-out highlights. And the background is clean. To recap, the overall approach I take for almost any photo is to: • Get a good background • Find good light, or make it good • Add my subject • Work out my focus point, framing and desired depth of field.
