Artificial Portrait

I think it's important for portrait photographers to occasionally remind themselves what it feels like to walk away from a shoot seeing doughnuts (from a ring flash).

So, as I was tooling around yesterday taking some self portraits I decided to make like Brad Trent and do what he calls an "artificial portrait" by pulling back to show the reality of the lighting being used to create the picture.

I usually find including your lights in the frame to be cliche, but Trent's portraits are about pulling back the curtain rather than than saying "Ooh, look at the cool gear that I have and you don't." He pulls it off.

As far as portraits go I've largely been influenced by the work of Dan Winters and Ben Baker, among others. I think my own style is somewhere in between the subtle but dramatic Winters and the high-contrast, almost surreal look of Trent, but for these pictures I went for the more contrasty look.

To do this right I should have pulled the camera back and included my ring flash in the shot too, but there was a wall right behind the camera position so I had to zoom out rather than back it up.

Also, I cut my feet off. Oops.

Below is the shot that I was originally going for (in my defense, I didn't have the best raw material to work with).

Self Portraits

Some people take self portraiture to a fine art form. If you don't believe me, just check out some of the 365 Days stuff people are doing on flickr. Personally, I'm not narcissistic enough do take pictures of myself every day, and as a photographer I prefer to have better raw material to start with!

In any event, I have been doing some selfies lately, as a way to experiment with lighting equipment and techniques I seldom get to use. I had this idea of a bright background portrait with a snooted light on the face of the subject. I didn't want a completely white background or a completely silhouetted subject, but instead just enough detail to impart some texture.

I decided to take it a step further and light the background unevenly in an effort to create a sort of chiaroscuro effect contrasting light with dark (a style that I like and use frequently in portraits). With no models or athletes of the year around, I recruited the closest thing to an athlete I could find--namely me in my fencing whites.

These are the results. Not exactly what I wanted--largely due to space and lighting equipment limitations--but still the effect I was going for. Lighting is one flash aimed at the background from the lower right, and one tightly snooted flash high about 45 degrees to the left. aimed at my face.