Read This If You Want to Take Great Photographs of People
Isolated against white, theirs is a beauty derived not from styling and social status, but the stuff of real life.
Context always plays its part, particularly when your subject is saying one thing and the background another — juxtaposition.
You can’t ask them to work too hard, which means nailing your composition.
Context may well be important to the concept of your portrait, but this doesn’t necessarily mean you need to show it. ...to hint at the context, whether that’s with a well — chosen title or subtle visual clues within your portrait.
...to see connections even when they are being drowned out by the rest of the world.
Candid photography relies on the power play between subject, photographer and viewer to be weighted towards the latter two.
Context always plays its part, particularly when your subject is saying one thing and the background another — juxtaposition.
You can’t ask them to work too hard, which means nailing your composition.
Context may well be important to the concept of your portrait, but this doesn’t necessarily mean you need to show it. ...to hint at the context, whether that’s with a well — chosen title or subtle visual clues within your portrait.
...to see connections even when they are being drowned out by the rest of the world.
Candid photography relies on the power play between subject, photographer and viewer to be weighted towards the latter two.
The best group portraits still capture the individuality of each subject.
once you have posed your group, let them stand there. Let boredom creep in. Let their gazes and body language wander a little. By doing this you’ll capture a different kind of group portrait, one made up of individuals rather than faces in a crowd.
Colour enlivens what black and white dampens, black and white simplifies what colour complicates and where colour shocks, black and white can transform atrocity into art.
Light is never neutral. It always comes loaded with psychological implications. ... Natural light is just that — natural — and it carries with it a sense of purity. You don’t create or overly manipulate it. You simply work with what it gives you.
And it’s the sheer impact of detail and absence of any emotive lighting that suggests, in spite of all our efforts, a portrait can only record the surface of someone and nothing more.
Ambient light is at its most atmospheric when it’s a mixture of natural and artificial light.
Colour enlivens what black and white dampens, black and white simplifies what colour complicates and where colour shocks, black and white can transform atrocity into art.
Light is never neutral. It always comes loaded with psychological implications. ... Natural light is just that — natural — and it carries with it a sense of purity. You don’t create or overly manipulate it. You simply work with what it gives you.
And it’s the sheer impact of detail and absence of any emotive lighting that suggests, in spite of all our efforts, a portrait can only record the surface of someone and nothing more.
Ambient light is at its most atmospheric when it’s a mixture of natural and artificial light.