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
Posts Tagged ‘Composition’
Learn the Secrets to Edit Photos Professionally – Photo Editing Made Easy
November 1st, 2009
There are many forms of art and unbelievably, photography is one of them. Some critics may argue that because the finished product has not been produced by hand then it should not be considered an art. Stop and think about it, capturing a moment within a frame on a piece of equipment and knowing exactly when to shoot is art at its very best.
When it stops becoming an art is when individuals take it for granted and simply snap any old photo. Then they take it back and let their editing software get it to a reasonable composition and they are satisfied with that. In this case, it is simply called taking a picture; it does not come into the same category as art.
To extend this concept if every effort is put into taking the picture then this effort is carried over to the editing aspects of it. They are not a separate entity. The photo is a creation and the photo editing software is a tool that assists in this area.
If an individual is new to digital editing software, they will learn to work with the basics and usually are quite impressed with their accomplishments. If at this point they extend their knowledge and truly learn, what some of the editing software is capable of they will be astounded at the outcome.
The basics are the cropping, sharpening, adjusting the exposure and changing the color for example. Some of the more advanced techniques are cutting and pasting. Inserting objects within the pictures and creating a unique piece of art. You can even take old pictures, scan them in to your computer, and edit them bringing forth a completely new photograph.
You can even create storybooks with your photographs. You can add text and even add pictures of your kids using them as the focal point without them even being in the existing photo. What you are doing here is manipulating your photos. A great piece of software for this technique is the Adobe Photoshop. In fact, photographers will use the term shoppe to refer to manipulated photos.
When you are trying to determine the best photo editing software you may want to think about downloading one of the free ones from the net first. Use these as your learning tools. Once you have mastered them then move on to one of the more advanced ones, which you will probably want to buy. If you learn on the free ones, first you will have a good idea what you want to buy in the advanced version. You will not be spending money on basics that you do not need. This can afford you a great saving, because you will only end up buying what you need.
It takes time to learn good skills at digital editing, but you will reap the benefits when you see your finished work. Between striving to take excellent photos and then editing, those to make them even better, you are bound to get the best from your photography efforts.
By: Lucas Godfrey
