portraits

Reminiscing (Part Seven)

Irish actor Pierce Brosnan.

There are a few reasons why a photographer will shoot or crop a portrait very tightly:

1) Cut off distractions in the foreground or background. Sometimes the subject themselves might be wearing a distraction like text or logos on clothing, a shirt with an ugly colour or loud pattern, etc.

2) Dramatic effect. A tightly composed portrait emphasizes the person’s eyes and facial expression. An otherwise routine portrait can be made more attention-getting by cropping tightly.

3) Graphic effect. A tightly composed portrait can sometimes produce interesting lines or shape.
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Reminiscing (Part Six)

Yet another post reminiscing about some old photos.

The pictures below were shot during various press conferences which were also recorded on video. But the moments captured in these pictures are not noticeable in the videos.

The power of photography is that it can capture and isolate one moment forever. Video flashes by at 30 frames per second and your brain barely notices any of those frames. Your brain doesn’t actually see video or motion but rather it sees in a series of still images and remembers only key frames.

 

This press conference had name tags placed in the seats. While waiting for people to take their seats, US actor Tommy Lee Jones briefly held up his name tag.

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Reminiscing (Part Four)

There’s a photography saying that goes something like: One out-of-focus picture is a mistake; ten out-of-focus pictures are an experiment; one hundred out-of-focus photos are a style.

A photographer will sometimes challenge themselves by looking for visual trends. For example:

• At a sports event, a photographer may do a series of photos of fans with painted faces.

• At a convention, a photographer might look for people doing selfies with their cell phone.

• During a political campaign, a photographer could do pictures of candidates holding babies.

A group of ordinary photos can seem more interesting if there’s a common theme or visual pattern.

Here’s a silly collection of images from a number of press conferences. The “theme” is that the people onstage couldn’t see the reporters asking questions.

US actress Julianne Moore.

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Reminiscing (Part Two)

Indulge me as I reminisce about a few more photos and aimlessly fill another blog page.

The pictures below are all scanned film images. Each of these portraits, except for the last one, were done in about five minutes because that’s usually all the time a photographer got.

 

US musician Kyle Eastwood (yes, that “Eastwood”) in Toronto, January 19, 1999. He composed the music for several of his father’s movies as well as for one of his sister’s movies. I’ve also photographed his father and sister.

The photo was done with one softbox to the left and Fuji Press 400 film.

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Balancing Act

There are three types of colour photographs: those with bad colour, those with accurate colour and those with pleasing colour.

If the skin tones in your business portrait don’t look good or if your pictures have an overall colour cast, then your photos have a bad colour balance.

Accurate colour is required when the colours in a photo must match the real-life colours. For example, clothing colours in a catalog should match the actual colours.

Pleasing colour is for pictures that have to look nice rather than be absolutely accurate. Portraits often have pleasing colour because a nice skin tone is usually preferred over accurate skin colour.
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Mugshot or Business Portrait

A moment from the pre-game activities at a Toronto Raptors game a few days ago. The photo was taken with a 12mm fisheye lens and has nothing to do with this post.

Today I received a request from a small company to do a group photo. They wrote that their staff has changed and they needed an updated group photo of their seven employees.

The email said the group must be posed in a single row, everyone evenly spaced apart and no one overlapping the person next to them.
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Voting For A Business Headshot

Canada is currently in the middle of a federal election campaign. Let’s take a look at the business headshots of the party leaders and all the candidates. (Note that political party web sites change from time to time especially with regard to information about their leader.)

If you have a few minutes, click on the links to each party’s candidate page and browse the portraits. Which ones do you like, which ones do you ignore? Why? Is it the lighting, the smile (or lack of), the eyes (or lack of eye contact), the background, or maybe something else? Which ones get your vote based only on their business portrait?

 

Liberal Party

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s headshot was cropped from a five-year-old picture. It uses window light and some type of reflector to give it a natural look. The image on the Liberal site is low resolution and was upsampled to give it visible blur and jpeg artifacting. Why would they do this?

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