Not People Watching, Rather Watching People

I’m not real sure how I see portraiture, but I love photographing people. If you had talked to me several years ago, I would have told you, “no, I do not shoot portraits, I do not like the studio, and no, I will not shoot your wedding.” That was several years ago, before I started shooting much for magazines on an assignment basis. In all honesty, it was actually a magazine assignment that really turned me on to photographing people. The story called for ten environmental portraits of the top researchers at Texas Tech University. “Can you do it?” “Sure, when do you need the photographs?”

Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to photograph some great folks, such as the football team posted on an earlier date! Here are just a few:

The best piece of advice I ever received from another career magazine photographer was to approach a portrait from the get go thinking of how I can use the ambient light before thinking lights! This was around the time that I thought what I NEEDED to shoot successful portraits was lights, and big, powerful, numerous lights! In a digital photographic world that seems to produce overlit portraits (in some cases, this approach is amazing! Others, not so much amazing, rather just images exhibiting technical competence), it’s just nice to see the real person in the image. I’m not saying I’m against artificially lighting folks, ’cause Lord knows I love my speedlites and strobes, but when push comes to shove, some of the most revealing portraits are those taken with naturally transparent light.

But like I said, I do like my lights!

These last two portraits are special to me, not in the fact that they are traditional looking. Obviously there is some “photoshopping” removing some colors to produce and off-sepia tone. However, it’s how the light fell on the subject matter, and what is the light source throwing off this encompassing light, you ask? A kitchen light with a cylindrical square globe diffusing the light. The globe is about four inches deep, just enough to focus most of the light straight down like an intense soft box! You’d be surprised how many of your most favorite portraits taken by well-known photographers are taken! I give you the kitchen as an example.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Blog, Learning, People, Teachings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.