Susan Sharpless Smith

This week’s class focused on portrait photography. In Wikipedia, a portrait is defined as a photograph “in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person.” Often the image that comes to mind is posing in a studio; this is not surprising as we all are familiar with Matthew Brady’s formal portraits of significant figures of that time or with the more contemporary Olan Mills version.

Will takes a more broad view of what comprises a portrait. He concurs that a portrait should convey the personality of the subject, but he showed us examples of images that included action, full body shots and even a few that did not include the person’s face.

Rather than teach us any technical uses of the camera in portrait-taking except to remind us about hard and soft lighting, Will gave us some more creative aspects to consider:

• The biggest challenge to taking good portraits is the barrier that is between you and your subject: the camera. A tripod can be used to get out from behind the camera.
• You can change perspective to make the image more interesting.
• Play around with eye contact. Get the subject to look in other directions than directly at the camera.
• Be aware of the background behind the subject. Use interesting ones like ivy,old wood, brick walls.
• Go for candid moments; standard portraits are dull.
• Introduce props.
• Focus on one body part and get close.
• Take a series; keep shooting to get a few good shots.
• Frame your subject in some fashion.
• Shoot wide and put the subject in an environment.
• Change the angle on the camera.
• Introduce movement.
• Fill the frame with somebody’s face

Our final assignment for this series of classes is to submit four different portraits including someone you don’t know.

Portraits are something I do as part of capturing whatever event I am documenting. I feel like (without thinking too much about it!), I have actually accomplished some of these ideas over time. It prompted me to go back through my Flickr collection and assemble a new Portraits set.

I find that I haven’t been too compelled to run out and take portraits to practice the ideas and may just pull a few of my favorites to share at our last class this Tuesday. I might try to find a stranger tomorrow but admit that is a bit beyond my comfort level. If I yearned to be a photo-journalist, I could see this would be an important skill, but since I prefer to capture images of people I know or events I am documenting, I am not sure I feel the need to  put myself out there on this one! But maybe the mood will hit me and I’ll get bold.

Here are a few of my favorite portraits I’ve taken in the past year or so:

This is what Will would describe as a portrait where you frame the subject. Meredith (my favorite subject) was playing with her Tinkerbell Tree House. I actually took this with my iPhone camera as it was what was handy to capture the moment.

I love that I was able to capture a quiet moment between Ron and Meredith as she played on his iPhone. These are the kinds of portraits I prefer – capturing subjects I know while their attention is on something other than the camera.  I like the soft lighting from the lamp.

This is my favorite 2010 image of Meredith. In this one, it shows Will’s suggestion to get the subject to look off camera. Of course, Meredith isn’t going to take direction, so I had taken several quickly and this one turned out well. And how can you not love the monkey hat?

This is an example of zooming in on Sarah’s face so that it is the complete focus of the picture. I like her pink highlights and the big sunglasses!

I took this picture with my Pentax Optio W20 underwater camera in St. Maarten.  I like the reflections and the fact that Kate wore her sunglasses for the shot!

My final choice is this image of BFF’s Sharon Melnik and Karen Wernsing. I think it shows their affection for each other and I like the brick backdrop (ZSR Library).