Portrait Session

It was time to get back into the studio and use our cameras. This time with real live models. One of my fellow students invited a couple of friends along to pose for us, and we had the job of taking photo's of them.


Before we heading down to the studio we has a quick briefing.


Posing do's and don'ts:

• Don't turn the face away from the main light source
• Turn the shoulders, waist and hips at a slight angle. Square on makes the body look wide
• Align models chin to remove the appearance of a double chin
• Look at the expression - wear a smile
• Tilt the head
• Use a catchlight - angle the lights to enhance a catchlight
• Use long hair to fill an empty area

Camera settings

• Don't use a wide angle lens. Use a medium telephoto. 105 is perfect for head and shoulders
• Set shutter speed not below 1/60th second. 125 is perfect.
• If in studio setting (as we were) set the camera to daylight on the White Balance setting.
• Aperture will vary but usually F8 - F11 is good.
• Keep ISO as low as you can to minimise grain. However depends on lighting you are using. I found I needed to increase the ISO, especially for the low key portraits (see below)
• Try to focus on the eyes

We had two different types of backdrop set up. One was High Key. This means lots of bright lights and a very white background. The key to this type of portrait setting is EVEN lighting. The second was Low Key. This is using minimal lights to create a very different effect. Here you are looking to use the shadows cast by the Key Light to reveal texture, modelling and detail in the subject. Low Key photographs are much moodier than high-key, and usually have dark or black backgrounds.

Here are some of my best shots (pre photoshop can I add!):

Jo Blogz Version of a David Hockney Joiner

I am loving learning more about photography. And I am finding myself getting a bit frustrated with those who think it's just about recording something that happened. I do accept that we are all different beings though. Last week at college we interestingly looked at some of the work of a professional photographer who got frustrated with photography itself. And that was the famous photographer David Hockney.

One of Hockney's frustrations was with the the lack of time in a photograph. That is does just take one moment, and that in reality these are just instances within a series of events. He still loved photography though, and was not about to give up in it all together. His solution was to create a "joiner" to capture the greater feeling of time and space than any traditional photograph would. What his technique involved was taking a series of photographs of elements of the moment and then literally joining them together like a big jigsaw to capture the event. This technique was done pre-photoshop, and rather than creating one smooth image, it captures lots of moments, which when joined together demonstrate what has happened.

We watched a video to show this technique - which showed a movie camera shooting the same scene as he photographed. He argues that his result was more powerful than a movie as it allows the viewer to linger on different moments, rather than them just passing. For example the expression on someones face when they had solved a crossword clue, and the expression when puzzled - rather than these moment just passing as they would in real time. I found this technique quite fascinating.

Good job I was interested, our homework was to go away and create a joiner for ourselves. So, last weekend I headed up to St Paul's, and stood taking many many photographs of the building itself and of people sitting on the steps, passing buses, police cars etc. I took 222 photographs in total - the joy of digital! Individually each of these photographs will mean nothing but I hope when I piece them all together to create a big image of that Sunday lunchtime at St Paul's. I will add a picture of the homework when it is done.

Still Life Studio Session

This was one of the first opportunities to really get to "have a go" with our cameras. It was a real opportunity to be able to get into the studio and mess around with the different settings on our cameras. We were briefed to bring in something that was quick and easy to set up in the studio and shown some ideas. When starting out with still life photography, unsurprisingly simplicity is key. The tutor showed us some more complex sets that he had assembled and photographed, but the more things there are in the image, the more there was to think about.


Ideas were:

• Fruit and Vegetables
• Leaves
• Conkers
• Flowers
• Books
• Toys

We also looked at some of the "tricks" that can be used in still life - for example using glycerin on items makes it look like water drops on the item.

Before we got into the studio we also spent a little more time thinking about ISO. The higher the ISO the more grain you get in an image - so in our still life setting we want to keep the ISO as low as possible (100 or 200). In a different environment a high ISO is necessary - for example when Jon took some images of Morrisey in concert when at college he needed an ISO of over 3000.

Back to our still life briefing - we also needed tripods for this. As an aside I am still yet to purchase a tripod, but the advise is that you get what you pay for. If you spend £20 on one then you probably won't get much life out of it, and it will be very flimsy, hence defeating the point of having one, which of course is to illuminate camera shake for clarity of images.

Into the studio and it was great fun to snap away. I brought in a selection of tropical fruit. Here are a couple of pictures I took - before they are "photoshopped" later in the course!

In a Flash

During one of the classes a couple of weeks ago - just ahead of our still life studio session which I will come on to talk about - we looked at the use of flash. We've all probably used flash on our cameras - and got annoyed with the "Red Eye" effect that we can get. This is caused by the intense light from the flash travelling down the iris and reflecting on the veins at the back of the eye. This is the "bounce" flash effect. With modern day Photoshop techniques, we can eliminate red eye with some brush strokes on the computer.

There are, of course, some other techniques for the effective use of flash. The teacher illustrated this with a picture of a robin in flight that he had taken. In this particular example the tutor had used "Fill in flash." This has the effect of just "filling in" or "highlighting" a section of the photograph or image in the photograph. It is a more subtle effect. On the robin illustration, it meant that the robins red breast and face were highlighted, but not the background - very effective. You need to be relatively close to the subject to use this technique.

The contrasting technique to this is "Full Flash" In this type of flash technique you are trying to light everything, as you want the full image captured. Whilst full flash will achieve this affect, the downside is that you can get very harsh shadows.

We also talked about "White Balance" This was a new term to me. To the human eye, a white object looks white regardless of the type of lighting. However, with photographic techniques, white can come out yellow or green or blue - depending on the type of lighting that is being used. With a digital camera, the colour temperature is adjusted with software to make the white areas look white. This adjustment serves as a basis for the colour correction. The result is natural-looking colours in pictures.

The following week we are going to be in the studio and using "softbox" lighting. The beauty of using a studio with all that equipment is that no flash is needed and therefore I can use the "daylight" setting for white balance.

It is worth bearing in mind though, as touched on above, that with modern photoshop techniques, a lot of the "problems" of shine / reflections / white balance can be adjusted using photoshop on the computer. I guess that can just make us lazy with learning the correct use of flash - however I think there are still techniques worth utilising when using flash to light our subjects to achieve the photograph we would like.