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 ‘Snapshots’
How Photo Editing Software Can Help Your Digital Photography
November 7th, 2009
I’m not very much of a photographer, but you would never guess that by looking at all the bordered images hanging on my walls or the snapshots ordered in my photo albums. Every individual one of them appears perfect, with first-class lighting and color balance throughout. Plus, there’s not a trace of redeye displaying on any of my people or pet portraits. How do I come up with such stunning results without knowing a thing about picture taking? I begin with a great photographic camera and finish with great photo manipulating software.
Photograph editing software package makes it humanly possible for inexpert in addition to professional photographers to retouch digital pictures in order to acquire distinguished images every time. Nowadays photograph editing software packages are so effective yet simple to apply that I believe everybody ought to make the best of this sort of software. As a matter of fact, I never print any images without touching them up 1st. Even if I took a jolly good snapshot the 1st time around, I know that I will always be able to make it even better with merely a couple of clicks of my computer mouse. For instance, my photograph manipulating program allows for me to increment brightness or contrast right away, delete red-eye promptly and easily, and crop out unwanted elements. Ultimately, I always obtain perfect images of my holidays and additional special events.
There are a lot of different photograph manipulating software packages out there these days. Barely a couple of years ago, these software packages were extremely costly and were normally just bought by professional digital photographers who earned their livelihood behind the lens. But nowadays costs have come down to levels that are more appropriate for the average buyer, and some photograph manipulating software packages (that performs just the most introductory functions) are even free. For additional features, I recommend avoiding the free software packages and spending a little bit of money to purchase a more powerful software package. If your photographs are anything just like mine, it will definitely become worth it!
Digital photo editing software is just another reason why digital photography is so much more flexible than traditional photography. If you were to try using your computer to edit traditional photos you would first have to scan your pictures, thus losing quality. With digital photos you simply past them from a digital camera to your computer using USB or a memory card reader, and that’s it, you’re ready to use your digital photography software to edit them to your hearts content, and you won’t have lost any quality at all.
In this day and age of digital photography and photograph manipulating software, there’s utterly no reason why anybody ought to have to settle for less than perfect images. Start using photograph manipulating software today and say bye-bye to those imperfect photographs forever!
By: Jayen Woods
Photo Editing is an Art
October 8th, 2009
In earlier times, you took your snapshots with your trusty old Brownie, removed the film cartridge and dropped it off at the drug store for developing. After about a week, you picked up your prints. What you got was exactly what the film was exposed to. No cropping, no sharpening, brightness or contrast adjustments were available unless you had your own film processing and print studio.
With the onset of digital photography, it has become possible for everyone to learn and perform successful photo editing. There exists a plethora of digital photography software that allow differing levels of image manipulation. With a decent digital camera, a computer with a quality printer, and one of the many versions of photo editing software, you can produce stunning photographs. You can crop for closer views of your intended subject, darken or lighten the exposure, adjust the contrast, sharpen the image, change it to black and white, sepia, or grayscale.
Add a good scanner and you have the ability to edit your old standard photographs. That old faded photo of you as a child can be brought back to life with a few clicks of your mouse. With the right software, you can place objects from one photograph into another. Create a montage of any person containing their pictures from birth to present. That beautiful old Ford you took a picture of at the cruise-in brings back fond memories?
Just insert yourself into the photo standing proudly beside the car of your dreams. Photo editing not only provides you with beautiful keepsakes of the people and places in your life; it can provide you with hours of fun and entertainment. Children giggle and squeal with delight to find themselves placed into unknown and exciting places.
One of the most recognized and utilized programs for photo editing is Adobe’s Photoshop. From this software the term “shopped” was phrased. People who work with and view photography use the term to refer to photographs which appear to have been manipulated to show something that was not in the original photograph, to remove something which was, or when the appearance of a person or object in the photo seems to have been altered. For example, you find a picture of a group of famous (or infamous) people, then you replace the face of one of them with your own for laughs, you have “shopped” the photo. Other programs are Corel Paint Shop Pro, and Serif Photo Plus, to name but a few.
There are basic photo editing programs available that allow you to do basic adjustments and learn basic photo manipulation. Some of these programs can be found for free such as Gimp for Windows, Serif’s Photo Plus, Paint.NET, Image Forge, Pixia, Ultimate Paint, and several others.
Which ever direction you take in choosing a photo editing program, be prepared to become totally hooked on working with digital photography. As you discover the many tricks and tweaks possible with photo editing, don’t be surprised to find yourself immersed for hours at a time tweaking and manipulating your photographs.
By: Rita Lambros-Segur
