Portraiture

Portraiture:
What makes a good Portrait?:
-Lighting
-Props
-Background
-Person
-Framing
-Camera position
-Interaction 
Portraiture:
-Portrait photography or portraiture in photography is a photograph of a person or group of people or animal that captures the personality of the subject by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses. A portrait picture might be artistic, or it might be clinical, as part of a medical study.

Yousuf Karsh:
Yousuf Karsh, CC (Armenian name: Hovsep Karsh; December 23, 1908 – July 13, 2002) was anArmenian-Canadian photographer best known for his portraits of notable individuals. He has been described as one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 20th century.   
The harsh lighting on his face brings out Churchill's facial structure. This suggests that he is powerful and strong as he is the leading the country and so he would want to be portrayed as masculine. 

David Lachapelle:

 This is an image of Amanda Lepore and the soft lighting emphasises her femininity and the bright lipstick and leopard print background shows her character. 

Image Bank:


 (AO:1.  You must ensure that several of the visual ideas/inspirations within the image bank are pursued. )

My Own Images:

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Images that need Improvement:

IMG_0738.jpg:

For this shoot I was struggling with exposure. I wanted to keep to a low F-stop to keep a narrow depth of field that was focused on my subject as it was a portrait. However, I couldn't get the exposure at the right level: it was either too dark or too light. I couldn't make it too long as the Crows kept moving around and the sunlight was bright.  Next time I will focus less on changing the F-stop and change the exposure to get the right level of light. This image is slightly over exposed but this can be corrected in Photoshop.

IMG_1029.jpg:

This image was over under exposed as not enough light was allowed into the sensor, this is because I had had the camera setting on a high F-Stop due to taking very bright photograph previously and I Hadn't changed the settings. I actually re-shot this directly after I took this, as I reviewed while I was with the dog.

My best Images:

0621:

0637:

 0650:

0808:

0918:

1008:

AO3: Record ideas, observations and insights relevant to intentions, reflecting critically on work and progress.

Before I went out to shoot I looked at Yousuf Karsh's work and I particularly liked his photograph of Amanda Lepore as he expertly captures her bold and unique character within one photo. With this in mind my main objective when I went out to shoot Portraits was to capture the character of the people I was photographing, as for me, that is what a portrait show convey. 

I'm pleased  with how my images came out as I feel they effectively portray her bashful and joyful character. 

AO2: Explore and select appropriate resources, media, materials, techniques and processes, reviewing and refining ideas as work develops.

For these images I used a Nikon camera body with a Cannon 18-55 mm lens. I fluctuated the F-stop from 4-12 to keep my model in a narrow depth of field. I used a ISO of 200 and the exposure was 1/125.

The ideal setting for shooting a model in a studio are F/11, ISO 200 and a shutter speed of 1/125. 

I had to keep the exposure short because my model kept moving and so did the birds. Although I kept the camera on similar settings in each photo,  it was a sunny day and so the contrast between shade and sunshine was extreme. For some of the light shots I lowered my F-stop to F/13. 

To improve my images I edited them in Photoshop...
0808:

For this first image I used curves to change the exposure:

Then I changed the image to black and white to make the crows tones more pronounced:

And finally I burnt and dodged the image to make it more striking:

I edited all of my images in a similar fashion to the example given. These are my final images: