Those of you who are familiar with how I like to explain things won’t be surprised when I tell you that understanding portraiture is pretty simple. You won’t be surprised that I say this because I’m going to tell you that I can break it down into 5 main categories. However you may be surprised when I tell you that this is where the simplicity stops.
The complexity of human nature, human emotion and the multiple of environments in which portraits are photographed mean that to obtain an effective, artistic but true to life portrait of your subject can be a testing task for even an experienced photographer.
For this article about portraiture I also want to give a mention to photographs of professional models. The reason? Photographers like myself use professional models to make our lives easier. We obtain impacting images of people (portraits & fashion) that reinforce an advertising message, by using professional models. The skills and confidence of a good model cannot be underestimated. A good model will almost predict, or at the very least work with the photographer to achieve the goal; making a good image become an outstanding image.
There are some truly brilliant and innovative fashion photographers out there who produce stunning images, but there are also unfortunately many photographers whose images would simply fall by the wayside without the collection and combined skills of models, make-up, hair stylists, clothes stylists and the retouching involved in the project. Even rather average fashion or advertising images have been made passable purely because the team of models, make up artists and stylists brought a bit of otherwise missing “X” factor to the image.
This is unfortunate because it often brings a level of credibility to images that on their own would be fairly mediocre. When I look at photography I try to look a little deeper and wonder how this image would look if it were just an ordinary person in the picture without excessive post production? Would it be able to stand on its own?
These are questions I often ask myself when shooting my own work, which is why I aim more for realism in my work than an over processed appearance. Two of my favourite photographers who shoot what I would call incredible and realistic portraiture are Rankin and Soren Solkaer. I also love the ‘environmental’ portrait work of Steve McCurry, Joe McNally, Sam Abel and Jody Cobb, all incredible National Geographic photographers whose work I’ve admired through the years. Good photographers can utilise all the outside skills of models & stylists but also combine them with their own exemplary knowledge of lighting, locations, composition, lenses, equipment and good people skills making images that hold their own without the added gloss.