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.

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. (This is just one reason people portraits and animal portraits should not be judged as one genre.)

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.

From that, I should be able to determine my positioning of camera, subject, background and lighting, focal length, and exposure and lighting settings.

Now, how do you obtain expression when photographing people? With the kea, I just watched and waited, and you can do this with portraits, especially portraits of children. But with more inhibited adults, it helps to have a few tricks up your sleeve.

Plant a seed – an idea or story that the subject can build on. This can be drawn from real life or entirely made up. In the image of the young woman with the pounamu, we talked about some episodes in her life that spoke to defiance. Her mother said that was exactly what she used to look like as a child.

You can use props and costumes to relax your subject into a pose and create an expression.

It also gives the hands something useful to do. Hands can be a posing nightmare – using a tennis racquet, lamps, books, walking stick, anything at all. If you are working on a concept or story, this will be easier to incorporate.

Take the photo at the decisive moment – that instant when the subject has the expression you want. That’s a knack you need to acquire. Here’s a cheat: get your subject to tell you about something, like “I hate spiders” or “How I love my cat”. At the moment the words have finished being said, click the shutter. The last thing the subject is thinking will reflect in their expression for a split second. Try it – it works!

Lighting for portraits is a major topic but is well covered in a range of books and online resources. You do not need studio lights and modifiers, but they can be useful to give you more control and consistency. You do not need much extra light, but you should make it big and really close – closer than you might think. A small light turned up but far away (like direct sunlight or a spotlight) will give you hard, contrasty light and little falloff between your subject and the background. A big light source close by but turned down low (like an overcast sky or a light in a softbox or a reflector) will give you soft, diffuse lighting and gentle shadows, separating the subject from the background. That is what you usually want.

ABOUT:

Paul is a member of Christchurch Photographic Society and a PSNZ member. He has achieved a PSNZ Associateship, is an accredited portrait Master Photographer with NZ Institute of Professional Photographers, and is an Artist AFIAP. He has won several awards over the last decade, includingl, • Gold Medal, PSNZ Natex, 2020, with “Molly”

• Gold Medal, PSNZ Natex, 2019, with “Hine ki te Pounamu”

...Portrait Photography

Paul Willyams APSNZ AFIAP MNZIPP

The image of the young Irish woman was taken in a park at dusk, with a splash of light from a single flash bounced in an umbrella. The flash light didn’t make it to the bushes in the background; I only had ambient light. The flash was mounted on a stand and triggered off-camera.

When you are starting out, or trying to help someone else with their images, it is good to know the common reasons for portraits not working.

• It is not sharp where it needs to be, usually the closest eye, especially if the focus is somewhere else, like the tip of the nose.

• Blown-out highlights on the skin. Skin is typically a stop or two brighter than the mid-grey the camera is calibrated for, so it is easy to over-expose.

• Unnatural colour tones. This often results from adjusting for under-exposure, the wrong white balance, or reflected or filtered colours. Look for magenta casts and green tints from leaves. Note that the skin’s basic colour is orange, so adjust the Orange channel. In Photoshop, use the Gamma adjustment on the Exposure tool to make skin brighter or darker. • Dead eyes. Ideally, eyes have a catch-light; otherwise, they can look shaded and dead.

• Too much contrast, from hard lighting or overdone flash or shooting in “dappled light” ̶ it looks soft to the eye but goes all patchy in the camera.

• Over-processing. Try to get the capture right. Skin should look natural and imperfect, not smoothed to a plastic blur.

• Not retouched where it shouldn’t be. Without going too far, a delicate balance removing stray hairs and temporary blemishes.

• Disturbing shadows. The nose's shadow looks good when it creates a soft patch on the cheek, but when it cuts right across the cheek to the shadow of the face, it looks awful. “Nose to the light, eyes to the camera” is a useful posing instruction.

• Background distractions. The classic is the tree (or fence or pipe or sign) coming out of someone’s head. Or, the background is included and in focus but doesn’t add to the portrait; hard shadows of the subject on the background.

• Distortion. The camera’s perspective can do weird things to the human body, especially with shorter

focal lengths. Arms can be shortened, big bulges appear, and faces look like they will explode.

• Cropping too tightly, or not tightly enough. You usually want all the head in the frame, with a little room to move, but not so much that you create negative space for no reason. You must also be careful where you amputate arms and legs.

• Hands and legs are not well-posed. Hands, in reality, are huge compared to the rest of the body and can easily look tense. A side-on view of the hands, looking relaxed, is what you want. Avoid shooting knee caps – they look ugly on most people.

• Clichéd pose. Don’t do the ”arms on hair with bikini” look.

• Static, squared-up pose. Work more side-on, separate the legs and arms from the body. Pose more radically than you think you should.

• Too much white in the eyes. You want to see their irises, not the whites of their eye with a sliver of the iris.

• One for your mother. Some portraits are not for competition, even though they are lovely family snaps. Finally, here are a few words on how to conduct a shoot.

You should agree on your objectives for the shoot with your subject. Objectives include the use of images, approval process and payment. Exactly what this looks like will depend on the shoot – is it a family portrait for your parents or a commercial shoot with a professional model? It is a good idea to put this in writing.

Be exemplary in your behaviour during the shoot. Even with family members, ask permission to touch them if you need to adjust something, and they can’t do it themselves.

Prepare and plan for the shoot. Know your gear, set up and test in advance. Follow up promptly after the shoot. Meet all your obligations to the subject.

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