What’s the difference between a common snapshot and a portrait? What does it take to transform a portrait into fine art? Some say that a portrait has to be oriented vertical. Others believe that the subject must look straight to the viewer or that the photo must be black and white. All these are far from being reliable criteria for judging the artistic value of a portrait.
Snapshots are candid photos taken randomly without any intent of making art. There is no or very little planning, no attention to lighting and composition. Snapshots are good for capturing everyday moments and sometimes a portrait make come out by accident. But this happens very seldom and is rather an exception. Portraits generally have a lot of creative work behind. For the artist, this work begins at the first contact with his customer. This can happen over the phone, e-mail or face-to-face. Meeting the customer in person if possible is the best way to go. This allows you to study his/behavior, gestures, posture, learn about his/her personality, likes and dislikes etc. All this information will help you in planning the photo so that it says something about the subject. It is also important to have some sort of chemistry or at least be able to work together. However, it is very common that the first face-to-face meeting takes place at the moment of the photo. While this is not optimal, it can be done. After all, not all portraits have to be works of art. Picturing the person realistically in his/her best pose is a portrait.
Good portraits are achieved by paying attention to every element including camera technique, lighting and posing. It is also important that it reflects the personality of the person being photographed. This is not typically achieved in chain store photo studios. It is much better to schedule a couple of interviews to find out more about the person. Then you can build on the conceptions for the portrait, evoking personality traits. You should portray the person in such a way as to allow the viewer to feel something about what that person is like just by looking at the photo. If you’re including more people, like families or group, it is important that the photo reflects the relationships between them.
Good portraying also requires post-production or finishing work. Before digital photography, retouching used to be made on the negatives and prints and there were limited changes you could make. Complicated chemical processes were used to improve the photos. Nowadays, everything from dodging to burning, blurring and highlighting is done on the PC using photo editing software. While it is certainly much easier than it used to, it still requires artistic vision, planning and expertise, as well as work. A photographer spends about 15-30 minutes on a photo featuring one or two persons before it is ready for print. The time is longer if you have more people in the photograph or you need to make a collage of several images.
All in all, the ingredients of a great portrait include getting to know the subject (usually through pre-interviews), thorough planning, mixing the information you have on the subject with your own artistic vision, good lighting and camera technique and guiding the subject into poses to portray his/her personality. You also need cooperation from the subject.
By: Alex Don
Release the Inner Artist With Deco Shop Canvas Prints
February 8th, 2010 by admin No comments »
A deco shop is a new breed of do-it-yourself art. Creating a masterpiece from digital stills can be done at the touch of a button; all you need is access to the internet, a stockpile of photos and a moment of creative flair. With the assistance of a little bit of nifty software, like the sort of thing that has been in use at Snappy Snaps and the likes for the last few years, your photos can be transformed into a canvas print or a poster. There are settings to crop, cut, paste and distort, and if you are feeling particularly arty, play with colour and contrast too.
Although the package is simple to use and aimed at the basic level of pick a picture and put it on canvass, there is potential for its use in far more arty ways. Think Warhol and multiple art works, think crazy colours and obscure angles. Get inventive with the software and create something more than a photo on fabric. Your creation may not be hung in the Tate Gallery once you’ve done, but it has the potential to be a great conversation piece at a dinner party, or a fabulous gift for a friend.
However, if you aren’t feeling quite so wild about becoming the next Picasso, it is a beautiful way to display a favourite picture. Holiday landscapes and portraits of a loved one can be released from the hard drive where they never get seen and given a new lease of life on the wall. It can also be a novel way to display favourite pictures all together on one wall. We are quite used to a photo wall of gilded frames and glass, with every momentous occasion captured for posterity.
There have been many photographic fads over the years, and just as many art fads too. They all have a place in our hearts though, and they often act as a reminder of the times. Just like the Bay City Rollers souvenir socks that are hidden in a cupboard somewhere. One such ‘fad’ was in the 1980s with the Athena poster. The aesthetic was black and white or sepia tones of either a supposedly cute or romantic scene; or more often, a down right seedy image of a semi clad man or woman. These posters depicted burly and overly handsome men holding babies, sultry women in faux forties attire waiting in train stations and the infamous tennis player with her bum cheeks showing. Classy.
Another that springs to mind is the fisheye photo being put in a bubble glass frame. All very good fun, and looks great, but only in small, amounts. Having a whole photo wall of fish eyed faces with big noses and skewered landscape shots and the novelty soon wears off. Polaroid photos on the other hand have a special place in my heart, and still do, even with the super slim multi purpose digital photo boxes that we carry at all times. Polaroids have an expectation and a randomness about them. They come ready framed, and so look great when put on a wall en mass. The way the colours degrade over time give feel that is purely stuck in the 1970s, even if it is a picture of the millennium dome.
Polaroid photos have actually made it into the realm of fine art. A guy called Araki has on numerous occasions displayed Polaroid pictures of food, flowers and half naked ladies in a massive montage of around 1000 stills. The advancing technology may well put the photographic canvas on the fine art agenda, rather than demoting it to room 101 with the pop culture posters of the 1980s.
By: Dominic Donaldson
How to Photograph Artwork With a Digital Camera For Use on the Web
February 7th, 2010 by admin No comments »
Getting a good digital image of artwork is very important if you want people to get the full impact of your artwork. You need to have good quality digital images of your artwork for Online Galleries, PR materials, exhibitions and galleries. Your digital images are your artwork online, so they need to look as close to the original artwork as possible. You want to make a good first impression, don’t you? If you have a great piece of artwork and it looks dull, dark and gray on the computer screen, it will automatically disengage the viewer and viewers will not want to look at it, it will not interest viewers.
Equipment -
1. Camera – I use an Olympus 4.0 Megapixel digital camera which is a decent camera, but any good quality digital camera will work. Read your camera instruction guide to find all the options for taking good quality pictures. Always take high resolution .tiff pictures because you can always decrease the image quality and file size of a digital picture, but you can’t start from a low resolution image and make it high resolution.
2. Lighting – You do not have to have an expensive photo lighting system or a really expensive camera, what I use is those clamp on metal reflectors that you can buy from the hardware store and I use 500 watt photo light bulbs from the camera store in the clamp on metal reflectors. I use four of these at one time.
3. Tripod – A tripod is also very helpful, but you can do without it if you have to. Use a sturdy tripod with tilt and rotation. If you don’t have a tripod, make sure your shutter speed is at least 1/60 and hold the camera steady and squeeze the trigger gently.
4. Photo Editing Software – The final component is the computer software to adjust the images on the computer, I use Adobe Photoshop software which is awesome. There are many other Photo Editing software programs available, and basically you just need to be able to crop the image and adjust the colors and the lightness and darkness of your digital images.
Procedures -
1. Shoot indoors with at least two 500-watt photo flood lamps (3200K) mounted in reflectors. If your artwork is 22″ x 30″ or larger you should probably use four lights.
2. Put the artwork on a piece of black matte board for a background. Fasten art to the black board with double-stick tape, tacks or use a black mat. Place on the wall or on an easel or on the floor. The art must be parallel to the camera lens, the center of the lens pointing at the center of the art. Use a bubble level to be sure camera and art are level. Tape a gray/color scale next to the art so that you will have a reference for adjusting the color of your digital image.
3. Lamps should be 4-5 feet away from the art, position the lights at a 30 degree angle to the surface of the artwork and point each of the four lights to a separate corner of the artwork so that the light will evenly illuminate the entire surface of the artwork. Check to be sure there are no hot spots, shadows or shine reflecting off the art. The room should be completely dark when you shoot. Cover the windows and turn out the lights. For textured work like collage try raking the light, using just one light from the side and adjusting the exposure accordingly.
4. Fill the viewfinder or LCD (digital) with the IMAGE ONLY, centered and absolutely square to the sides, top and bottom. Move the camera or zoom lens, not the art. Focus carefully in the center of the art.
5. The best combination is a slow speed setting (1/8, 1/15, 1/30 sec.) with a high f/stop (f11 or f16) for color saturation and sharp image. If you don’t have a tripod, you will need to use at least 1/60 shutter speed. The best setting for balancing the light is “tungsten” (which is the type of light bulb you will be using). Tungsten is under “white balance” in the camera settings. Change your white balance setting to tungsten, if your camera has that option.
6. Always take the highest resolution .tiff image possible (for print applications), you can always save that as a .jpg or .gif or .png for use on the web. For the web, a .gif file at 72 pixels per inch resolution is good for most web applications because it has a small file size and loads quickly.
7. Edit your digital image, in your photo editing software, so that it matches the look and feel of your artwork.
8. Organize you digital artwork files on your computer in folders so that you can easily browse to them for upload to online galleries.
Miscellaneous -
Group your artwork by size and shoot the same sizes in sequence, so you don’t have to adjust the camera or easel so much. If your pieces are a standard size, place tape on the floor to mark the position of the camera, lights and easel or art stand and also the placement of the art. It will save you time when you shoot again.
By: George McKim
