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How to develop the photographer eye #2 – Portraits

Pietro Zuco — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 06:18:43 +0000

I love to take portraits. It’s one of the funniest photo-experiences I have had. Have you ever wondered about how to take good portraits? There’s no answer for this, but we can follow some simple advices, specially if we start to focus on the main target: The subject.

The art of portraits is a game played by two people, the photographer and the model. The relationship between them is important and it’s the key point in the process to obtain the best expressions from our model. I remember that the first time I tried to take a portrait many feelings passed through my mind. I was nervous, I was shy and I was always afraid to make my model feel uncomfortable. The model as well perceived my feelings and at the end a whole uncomfortable environment got created. After that, I learned one important lesson: connect with your model.

Follow these recommendations and you will notice a huge difference in your portraits:

Get in touch with your model. If you will prepare a long photoshot, it’s better to meet first, and take a coffee. In that way, you’ll know about your model’s personality and create a more comfortable environment for the photoshot’s day. If you cannot have any previous contact with the model, always try to understand her/his personality that day. It will help you a lot for capturing and anticipating expressions and angles related to each person.
Talk to your model. Let her to be free to create by herself. Improvisation is the main source of unbelievable expressions and feelings. Ask things, feelings, try to put her in different situations like asking questions that she wouldn’t expect. Make her laugh. All of this will finally bring both to one point: get relaxed.
Try always to think that the model is looking at a lens and probably a huge peace of gear moving around her. Try to imagine yourself in her place, posing in front of a camera with a stranger in front of you moving around, asking you to put in that position, move your head, touch your hair and so forth. Some people get literally blocked. So, it’s your work, as a photographer, to relax and make the model feel just fine. It’s like a game.
Never and ever try to force your model to adopt a particular pose or to do something that she won’t feel comfortable doing. You want her to give to you the best of her talent. So always try to make her feel good.
Don’t be in a hurry. Take your time even if you have few. It’s better to have few good shots than 500 crappy pictures.
Don’t get stocked to some fixed ideas. Take different angles, different details of the face, the hands, everything. It’s a whole where each element plays a role in the final image. Relax about rules of photography and composition, try to brake them with harmony.

This is a fluid process, let it be. Portraits involve human communication and this is all about experience dealing with people. You can find a perfect portrait from a stranger in a street that accepts to pose for you. Even in that few seconds, try to imagine what kind of person she/he is. If you can, just exchange a few words. You will always learn something from others in this process.

Also remember that every person has a different color of skin, different shape. Some people are really expressive and others are just like a plain wall. Just try to adapt to them. At the end, they are the source of information for the stories in your picture. Try to catch it instead to force them to send the message that you want.
The art of portrait is like hunting feelings hidden in people faces and bodies. Everybody is unique and everybody has something to give. Print that in your film is your work :-)

Please share your experiences as a model or photographer.

Golden rules of photography

Pietro Zuco — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:51:11 +0000

I don’t like to talk about “rules”. I prefer to call them just advices. In fact following rules in photography means to understand nothing about it!
Anyway everybody calls them “rules” so let’s keep the traditional name.
These rules are based on the The Golden Ratio. It’s a special proportion that exists everywhere in nature. For some reason, it’s related to us as living beings in this universe and it affects the way we interact with things.

Rule of Thirds

This rule is more about composition. It has a strong relationship about how humans perceive reality and how humans read visual information.
You just have to divide the frame in three parts horizontally and vertically. So we will have three zones and 4 intersection points.

Try to place the objects of interest in the intersection lines and avoid to center the object in the middle of the image.

Of course it depends, for example, in this picture I cropped it to put the main subject (it was me…) in the middle of the frame. Why? Because the main subject of this picture is not related to the sharpness of the image but to the whole situation that shows a man fighting the wind with his bicycle.

One more scenario where the Rule of Thirds is applicable is in landscapes, where the horizon line plays an important role in the composition. Just try to avoid the horizon line to divide the image in two perfect parts. Just place the horizon line in the upper third or the bottom third, depending on which part of the image you want to give more emphasis. For example, if it is the sky, put the horizon line in the first third from the bottom.

Of course there are exceptions, for example in this picture I preferred to leave the horizon line just in the middle because in this picture the important part is just the horizon!

Diagonal rule

In this case we use the zone indicated by the following image. The important part of the image will reside in the zone delimited by those lines.

For example these pictures can illustrate these rules:

Golden Spiral

One more application of the golden number is an spiral. The one I draw in the picture is not perfect, but it renders the idea.
It’s not necessary that the object takes the whole picture. The important thing is that the composition makes the eye move to the center of what you want to show.

For example in this picture, your eyes will go immediately to the faucet. Okay, it’s the biggest object in the composition, but if I would like to take the faucet in the middle of the frame, the eyes wouldn’t point directly to the faucet as in this case:

There are more rules, these are the basic ones and the possibilities to play with proportions and discover new properties are infinite… So let’s try and play :)

Lightroom Tips #1 – Selective Desaturation

Pietro Zuco — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:13:36 +0000

Let’s see how I did to create this effect on this picture of Mio Igarashi. The picture was originally took with a Nikon D200 and RAW file format, lens: Nikkor 50mm/F1.4.

This is the final result, let’s see how to do it

In develop mode, select the “show clipping” tool by click in the little arrow or just press “j”:

In this way we can only see the 100% dark, the black parts of the picture:

Then, let’s select the “adjustment brush”:

This is a “swiss knife” tool. Let’s set just what we need to modify and apply it to the interested zones. In this case we want to make her background really dark, so let’s reduce the “exposure” and “brightness”:

This is how the bush is been shown on the picture. The “+” sign indicates that we will apply the bush in that zone and from there we just move around to the places we want to modify:

The blue part indicates the real dark zones. As far as we apply the adjustment brush with those settings, we can control which parts are really dark seeing at the blue color:

Once we complete this process we should have a perfect dark background that gives a sensation of deep-less to the picture. If we have no point of reference to understand where the background is, every people produces his/her own sense of deep behind the subject which could, in certain cases, be more suggestive than a normal background.

Now let’s desaturate to create a black and white zone. Again we choose the adjustment brush but this time with different settings. First make sure that you don’t alter the exposure and brightness setting those parameters to zero. Then desaturate completely as shown here:

Now apply just to the interested zones only :)

Advice:

If you plan to do an effect like this, first think about how you can help yourself to reduce the edit and post processing time. In this pictures the helping parts are: She has beautiful dark hair. As far the black and white part is the human body, her black hair helped me in the zones where the hair is over her dress. Just imagine to desaturate only the hair part over a colorful background… It would take hours and the final result could be a little bit fake.
Then, her dress has a black zone surrounding her breaths. That helped me not to worry about the precision to apply the desaturation brush.
A dark background also helped in this process. Remember that it’s not only a matter of time is also the fack that we want to make it as natural as possible. Everybody knows that that’s not real but if feels natural.

Check the final result

Do you like this kind of effect?
What about leave some parts of the face in black and white? for example a black and white face and red lips?