A Few Recent Portraits

Sometimes I like to post photos and let people enjoy them as-is. Other times, I like to take them apart a little. This self-criticism is good for me- it helps me make decisions around how I take photos in the future and is a necessary part of growing in a skill. I hope it helps others out there who are experimenting with photography as well. I’m entirely self-taught, so if I get things epically wrong, please forgive me. I welcome your own thoughts & insights as well- all that stuff helps me as a photographer too.

This is Seven. She’s daughter of my best mate growing up, Andy, who now lives in Arizona. As you can see, Seven has a thing for cats. Here she is on a Saturday [Caturday?] morning, all dressed up and complete with tail, ears and shoes to match.

Taking a portrait requires balancing a bunch of different facets. Ultimately, a good portrait needs to portray something of the humanity of the subject (assuming you’re shooting a human). That’s the ‘intangible’ aspect of the photo. On top of that, of course, there’s the technical aspects- lighting, focus, depth of field, and so forth. Somewhere in there, you want the photo to tell a story.

For me, that’s the growing enjoyment I find in taking portraits- finding that balance between art and science, between the spiritual and the technical. This isn’t the greatest portrait ever taken- but it is a fun one, and the technical aspects have come together nicely as well. Lighting-wise, the most critical aspect is the face. If you get the face lit right, pretty much any other blemish, flaw or downright catastrophe of light in the photo can be forgiven. Here, the image has been balanced for Seven’s face. It’s a sunny day, so having her in the shade where the light wouldn’t blow out her skin or cast her features into deep shadow was a must. I’ve used a shallow depth of field to isolate her from the busy background. This can be a matter of choice and context. Sometimes the background adds to a photo’s story, and other times it detracts. Here, I like that she’s sharp and in focus, while the backdrop falls away.

For the intangible, the photo has a sense of fun which Seven’s own happy spirit brings to the frame. She’s a little bit cheeky, exudes confidence but just the right amount of shyness as well. She’s proud as punch of her outfit which, as it happens, is also eyecatching and breaks her out from the background even without the shallow depth of field. She has a happy smile on her face- all in all, everything you want from a quick snap.

If I were to look for ways to improve this photo, the major one would be her eyes, which don’t stand out or pop in this image. It’s said over and over- because it’s the basic tenet of any portraiture- that it’s all about the eyes. She’s looking at the camera here, and her eyes are in focus, and she’s got an expression that supports the story in the photograph- but for it to pop a little more, her eyes would need to be a bigger feature of this shot.

Enough analysis on that one.

This is Four. She’s Seven’s little sister. She also loves cats, but she doesn’t yet have a cat outfit of her own. So, when Seven puts on her cat outfit, Four constructs one for herself. She sticks little triangles of paper on a headband for ears, and transforms her hands into paws with the aid of a couple of colourful (and, essentially, non-matching) socks. The effect? Epic cuteness.

This is Magic, our seven-year-old, on vacation in country Victoria. She loves a good swing, and she loves her hair, too. It’s thick and long and blonde, and she loved having it braided in Thailand, and she loves people commenting that it reminds them of Rapunzel from the cartoon ‘Tangled’.

I enjoy taking portraits with shallow depth of field- no secrets there. For the most part it serves me well. On this particular shoot, the challenge was getting the focus just right- shooting at f/2.8 is very unforgiving, as a millimeter or two closer to or further from the lens will cause the subject to be out of focus again.

In this shot I like the texture detail in Magic’s hair, and that her face says she’s clearly abandoned to the fun of the swing. I like that the angle is a little quirky, and that while the only elements that are sharp are Magic’s face and hair, there’s enough of the background to tell you what’s going on. This was shot on wide angle, not normally the best way forward for portraits, as it distorts shapes, particularly near the edges of the lens. However here, that distortion equally adds to a sense of movement across the frame, and I like how it feels as a result.

This portrait of M & J is more of a posed affair- something I try and avoid where possible, as I find greater pleasure in the candid and natural, and I find it easier to catch someone in their true comfort zone. It often takes several ‘warm-up’ shots to get people to relax a little and you can get a more authentic image, and in this case this photo was the last of several that I snapped. Here I’ve gone for a more environmental image- in this case catching them in the surrounds of the stream-bed we’d just hiked down to. The light under the trees was slightly dim and diffuse, the latter a real asset when taking portraits. Your biggest enemy from a natural light perspective is strong overhead sun when shooting people.

I’ve used the 85mm lens on this one. You can work two ways with environmental portraits- get nice and close with a wide-angle (but run the risk of distorting your subjects), or use a telephoto lens, but back away enough to still capture the surrounds. This flattens the image a little and keeps the subjects a little more true-to-eye. It also gives you more control over depth-of-field. DOF gets less and less pronounced the wider the angle of the lens you’re shooting with, and to compensate you need to get closer and closer to your subject- adding distortion. Backing away like this, you increase the in-focus portion of the image (important if you’ve got people stacked one behind the other as in this shot) but still employ enough blurring to the background to break them out of it a little. However the background here isn’t so blurred that it’s just green fuzz- you can still see trees, ferns, rocks and the stream sharply enough to know exactly where they are.

A bit of critique on this one: M’s face is in some shadow and her eyes considerably lost in it. This is where a little hit of fill-flash would really work wonders- or, if it’s more up your street (as it would be mine) a reflector.

This is Magic’s cousin. Here, he’s scrambled up into a nook behind a waterfall where vibrant green moss is growing. I like the shot. Cousin M is an energetic, boisterous and adventurous kid, and this shot captures some of that, with his attitude-pose, ballcap and the outdoor setting. On the other hand, he’s got a slightly serene look on his face, a moment of calm and even shyness that isn’t usually present. I like the unusual pose- it was just how he ended up perching naturally- and the way the dim background is coloured so differently from him means that even without a shallow depth of field, he stands out nicely from it. The light coming in from the mouth of the overhang illuminates his face naturally, and gives you good optics on his eyes.

This is Magic again, celebrating two gummy lollies at a party. I like the look of celebration captured on her face in the moment, and that it, to the exclusion of all else, is in sharp focus. I also like the way her cardigan creeps into sharp textured focus, and back out again.

This is Ames. I like this photo. She’ll hate me for posting it, which also adds to its appeal. But I like the colour, the focus, and the sense of life about it. It makes me smile. And I guess that’s all that you really want from a photo, once the shutter falls.

In the Gardens, Part I

The wife and I took a day off recently and headed down to Werribee Mansion. It’s a huge old stately home which has been turned into a public attraction, and has some enormous and very beautifully manicured grounds. We spent the afternoon enjoying the patchy sunlight and exploring the gardens.

The home itself is an attractive piece of grand architecture which makes for a nice backdrop to the flower beds. The light was challenging- but this made it interesting. Shifting clouds meant that catching enough light on the foreground to reduce the difference between light sky and darkened ground (dynamic range) was tricky- but when it worked, the cloudy sky was full of movement, interest and contrast. There were a couple of classic old greenhouses beside the flowerbeds, starting to sag a little round the middle, and they made for interesting subjects as well. The day’s photoshoot was a fun mix of portraiture and scenery, full of colour and soft lighting.

Here are a few of my favourite shots, these ones of the grounds themselves:

Baby Photos? Really?

Well, I guess being around home in Melbourne has given me a bit more time to hang out with friends and family, and one thing that has definitely been happening to a lot of my friends is… babies. Just at that age I guess. So I’ve spent a bit more time taking shots of them.

As those who’ve followed my blog and photos over the years know, portraiture is a newer venture of mine- probably something I’ve only really started to branch into over the last few years. Baby portraiture, even more recently.

Babies are an interesting thing, photographically speaking. On the one hand, they don’t move too fast, so it’s fairly easy to frame them up. On the other, it can be hard getting them to look at the camera- and even harder to get them to smile when they do. I haven’t mastered that technique yet, that’s for sure. Patience when taking photos of babies is a must.

As always with portraits, the number one thing, above all else, is to get the eyes right. You want them to be clear, sharp, open and expressive. They also need to be lit properly. I always prefer natural light over flash photography, and candid portraiture over posed. But the best thing about photographing babies is, in my opinion, that they don’t have any of the reserves or veils that people get when you take a photo. Their eyes express pure emotion. That emotion may simply be ‘what the heck is this thing being stuck in my face?’, but it’s honest nonetheless- there’s none of the facade that big people tend to put in front of their faces.

I enjoyed taking this lot, and I hope to get many more opportunities.

Fluffy

We went for a little walk around Albert Park Lake the other day. It’s mid-spring here (though you wouldn’t know it by the weather, thank you Melbourne.) Because it’s spring, there are cygnets by the bucketful swanning around, and I needed to take some photos.

This post is dedicated to friend & fellow aid worker @chasingcarly whose adventures [currently in Yemen] you can follow over at Chasing Carly, and whose adventures in cute furry animals you can follow at Travel Tails. I am fairly sure that if Carly were to become potentate of the known universe, her first decree would be to insist that furthermore, all currency transactions take place in the form of exchanges of photographs of cute furry animals.

Please enjoy the fluffiness.

For those of you needing a closer look at this cuteness, please see below:

Look at the fluffiness. LOOK AT IT.

5 Tips for Taking a Really Great Travel Portrait

Portraiture is something I’ve increasingly aspired to as a photographer. I love a good landscape- in fact, my landscape shots are often what people seem to enjoy in my shots. Portraiture is a different skill-set though. While light changes over a landscape in such a way that you may only have a few minutes to get the shot you want, the challenge of portraiture is even greater- you may have just fractions of a second to capture the image that you have in your mind’s eye. On top of that, a really good portrait often communicates far more power and emotion to the viewer than any landscape; it’s the human element that makes it special.

The basic rules all apply, of course. You want to think about composition (the rule of thirds is a pretty reliable starting point), colour (one of the joys of travel photography are the different colour palettes you can find in both the natural and urban environments) and lighting (shooting in the tropics presents visceral challenges with regards to fierce overhead lighting, washed-out skies and high-contrast backdrops, but dust and moisture can enrich late afternoon sunlight to make it magical).

I’m sharing some specific pointers I’d like to suggest for taking a decent travel photograph. They’re not exhaustive, nor are they unique to travel portraiture, but I reckon if you can nail these, you’re well on your way to capturing the sort of image you’ll want to bring home and share with friends and family when your adventures come to a temporary halt. (I’ll leave it to you guys to decide whether these shots fit the title or not…)

Note: All these photos were taken on a 3-day field visit in rural Niger in September this year.

1. Create a Connection

This is true with any portrait. I find the most powerful portraits are those where the subject is looking straight down the camera lens. It can feel (as a viewer) as though the person is looking straight out of the photograph at you. To achieve this, you generally need some sort of relationship with the person whose picture you’re taking. It might only be a momentary one- a glance in the street- or you may have asked the person to pose for you.

In travel photography you’re often communicating across language barriers, but respect is universal, so always put it into action. Just pulling out a camera and shooting willy-nilly is a sure way to upset people. I rarely take a photo where I haven’t signalled my camera (usually pointed upwards) and waited for an inviting smile or nod, or made eye-contact with the person and waited for them to acknowledge me in some way. If I sense hesitation or hostility, I smile and move on.  Even asking in a foreign language, people usually get the idea of what you’re wanting and can communicate a reply.

While in photojournalism there’s a power and pathos that comes with shots of human suffering or deep emotion, I find the photos that people go back to tend to be ones where the subject is joyful. People are naturally drawn to beauty. With that in mind, have fun. Laugh with the person you’re shooting, give them a big smile, turn it into a game. That won’t work in all cultures: for many, having a photo taken is a serious business and they want to look their formal best. Kids, on the other hand, usually love it, and in many African countries they’re overjoyed when someone points a lens at them.

Earlier I’d asked this girl if I could take her picture, to which she’d agreed, and I got a really sweet little shot of her smiling shyly while clinging to the trunk of a tree. A few minutes later she came back to me with a cheeky smirk asking me if I’d take another photo, and when I raised my camera she giggled. I speak no Hausa and she spoke no French, but as you can see, the communication worked just fine.

2. Consider your Background

When you’re taking a portrait, the person is your main point of focus, but they exist in a context. In fact this is the major difference between travel (and candid) portraiture versus studio portraiture. With the latter, you control the background ahead of time. With the former, you need to manage it on the fly- itself a challenge that can be both satisfying and heart-breaking.

Background can become a part of your visual narrative, or it can distract from it, so think about the effect you want. Environmental portraits frame people in a shot with items that contribute to telling that person’s story. A merchant in a fruit stall, for example, may be best photographed standing with all her colourful pineapples sharply in focus. For this you probably want to use a wider-angle lens (not too wide, as wide angles distort images and can stretch facial features unnaturally) and a reasonably small aperture (f/8 and higher, light-depending). Again, the joy of travel portraiture is that backgrounds are often exotic and full of interest.

On the other hand, a child on a busy street may get lost in the clutter if you don’t defocus your background. Use a mid-range telephoto lens and open the aperture wide to get a really shallow depth of field, which naturally throws the background out of focus. Just make sure your point of focus is spot-on, or you may end up with a fuzzy subject too.

If the background is unremarkable you probably want to use this technique too.  In the photo at the top of this page, the background was burning white sand- totally uninteresting and threatening to wash out the photo- so blurring it into white made the most sense.  This has advantages (declutter and an element of the abstract) but also disadvantages (the photo is placeless and has no context).

In this first photo, I chose to use a really shallow depth of field as the background was fairly dull, and I wanted the farmer to stand out. Using a small f-stop number (f/1.8) also means that the part of the shot that is in focus is REALLY sharp. The blurred green trees give just enough information to let you know you’re in the countryside, but don’t pull the eye away from the man’s wrinkled face.

In this next shot, the girl is standing against the wall, so both she and the wall are in focus. The wall is painted with a map of Africa. Although the girl herself doesn’t stand out quite so much from the background, the colours and textures are pleasing to the eye, and the map itself tells a story and gives the girl a context which (in my opinion) adds something unique to the photograph that might have been lost had she been against an empty or blurred background.

In this third shot, the boy is in focus while everything forward of and beyond him starts to blur out. There’s just enough detail, however, to give him a context- the cows, the harness and the water containers, as well as the rural backdrop. Because he alone is in focus he still holds the viewer’s eye, but there are other elements in the image that contribute to telling the viewer something about who he is and what he does.  Note: You could argue that this photo would have benefitted from a broader depth-of-field (something around f/4) to keep the cows sharp but still blur the background, and I’d accept that criticism, although I also like how isolated the boy is from everything around him; you can see just how precise the depth is by looking at how much of the yoke, front-to-back, is actually in focus before it blurs out.

3. Be Ready for the Right Moment

Facial expressions are fleeting, as are connections. If you’re in a place where you think you might see something interesting, have your camera out and switched on, with the right lens fitted, the correct mode selected, and your eyes scanning. You might be looking for a gesture, an emotion, or a fleeting glimpse of eye-contact. People may be moving. Think about your shutter-speed- will you be able to freeze motion given the light available to you? And think too about point number one and the importance of communication and respect; even in a crowded place, have you made eye-contact with the people you’re wanting to photograph, or made sure they’re comfortable with the camera? Stand-off lenses are all very well, but as a photographer you need to be asking yourself these ethical questions.

In both of these photos, these kids made eye-contact with me for just a few seconds where they were caught in a crowd of others. The children there had been watching me for some while and I’d been looking back at them and smiling, and noting those that smiled back at me and at the camera. I already had the aperture opened up so that when my opportunity came I knew I’d be able to isolate whichever children gave me a moment to photograph, and these two did.

4. Go for the Eyes

If there’s a cardinal rule in portrait photography, it’s this one. Eyes are all about moment and connection. They communicate emotion to the viewer, and a simple glance of a couple of degrees off-lens can make the difference between a missed opportunity and a wow moment. This is particularly true of close-ups.

For eyes, think about placement; rule of thirds is usually the way forwards here, so try and get one eye onto that sweet-spot at the intersection of the thirds-lines. An eye-line straight down the barrel is usually what I go for, and almost all of the portraits I’ve loved have involved that sort of eye contact. If using shallow depth of field, ensure that the eye itself is the point of focus. It’s all too easy to accidentally focus on the forehead or the tip of the nose, and even with a really strong facial expression, you’ll lose some of the punch of the image.

These two shots were both taken at a school in Niger (one inside the classroom and one outside), and they are both among some of my favourite portraits of all time.

5. Tell a Story

This is optional, but the difference between a techncially good photo, and a photo which makes people sit up and take notice, is that with the latter, they’re experiencing something new. The beauty of travel photography is that there’s always a story to be told, something new to see, something that’s exotic to the viewer back home, so try and think of what that story might be. A facet of daily life, a curious setting, some exotic produce, or just an unusual face that communicates a sense of place or time- it can be any number of things. Put this together with capturing the right moment and working on your background, and you’ll have a photograph that will really help you remember a place.

In this photo, I managed to combine moment, background, eye-contact and connection, and the setting was such that I’ve been able to capture a little slice of existence in this rural African village. Girls in Niger, as in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, are the ones mostly tasked with collecting water- even quite young girls like this one. Here, I love the colour, the bright light, her expression, and the pouring of the water all framed crisply against a blurred backdrop of other women and girls waiting at the well behind her (and again, contrast this with the image at the top of the page which has no background).

Travel photography- and portraiture- is a personal thing, and it’s up to you as the photographer to decide what you want to remember, and how. Really, if you take a photo, and it reminds you of something special, and you’re proud of it, that’s all that matters. I wish you all the best of luck out there, and most of all, I encourage you to have fun. If you’re not enjoying yourself with you camera, seriously, what’s the point?

Moor Advenchers of Kirk teh Kitteh, Part II

A follow-on post from the set of pictures I put up on Tuesday from a photoshoot with my housemate’s extremely adorable 7-month-old kitten, Kirk.

I’ll let the photos do the talking here (for a change…)

Moor Advenchers of Kirk teh Kitteh, Part I

A few months back my housemate got a kitten. He’s a ragdoll and he’s called Kirk. Some of you enjoyed the photos I posted of him back then, when he was thirteen weeks old. He’s now about seven months old, and I figured it was high time to share some more photos.

Also, some people (I’m looking at you, @ShoesfromthHood) have been gently implying they would like to see more photos of Kirk teh Kitteh. So you can consider this my contribution to the #1millionkittens campaign.

I am expecting cupcakes.

And in all seriousness, he’s such a darn cute little thing to look at that I just couldn’t resist. So I went out and had a little play with Kirk in the garden yesterday afternoon. As a ragdoll he’s supposed to be an indoor cat, but he’s okay to play in the fenced back yard (as long as he doesn’t realise he can climb the gate).

Comments on the somewhat wild nature of our back garden are not required. I like to think of it as our very own Carbon Sink.

It was a long way from the easiest shoot I’ve ever done. I used my Canon EF 85mm f/1.8, one of my favourite lenses and which I adore shooting with, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere. It rocks my world when it comes to portraiture, and that crisp, shallow depth of field and huge aperture make it a joy to shoot with.

(A reminder to the non-photo-literate readers among you, ‘depth-of-field’ relates to the amount of the image, front to back (depth) either side of the point you are actually focusing on that is in focus. Shallow depth of field means that only a small amount of the photo either side of that point of focus is sharp, which is the technique which gives those pleasing-looking portraits where the subject’s face is nicely in focus but the background is all smooth and blurry).

The downside to shooting at such a shallow depth of field is that if you get your point of focus even slightly off, the bit of your photo that you want in focus, is no longer in focus. This is a challenge even at the best of times taking portraits. When you are dealing with a seven-month-old kitten which has an attention span of a fruit-fly on speed, this is a task not entirely different from trying to hit a sheet of paper with a dart, side-on, while riding a mechanical bull.

Using a variety of tricks, cajoling, and abuse (it’s a good thing Kirk’s too young to understand cuss-words) I did manage to get his attention enough times to get a handful of shots I was pretty pleased with, and which I feel capture both his beauty (he is one gorgeous-looking cat) and his cheeky, resilient and adventurous spirit.

I’ll post the second tranche of these photos on Thursday to keep the variety up. After all, I’d hate to overwhelm you with kitten cuteness.

Click some of the shots for a larger version…

Depth-of-Field Showcase: Lift

Depth-of-Field is a photographic term that references the notional third dimension, or z-axis, of a photographic image.  Of the various pieces of photography relating to the basics- shutter speed and aperture- it’s one of the more elusive for most people to grasp (although everybody appreciates a nice portrait with a blurred-out background).  Effectively, it is the amount of the photograph front-to-back (or, from close to the lens to further away from the lens) that is sharp and in focus.  It is controlled by aperture, which is the diaphragm, or hole, in the lens that allows light to reach the plate, film or sensor.  A wide aperture (small f-stop number, counterintuitively, such as f/1.8) leaves relatively little of the photograph front-to-back in focus, while a narrow aperture (large f-stop number, such as f/22) leaves lots of the photograph in focus.  So a portrait shot at f/3.5 may keep the person who is the subject of the photograph in focus while throwing the background into a nice pleasing blur (known among photographers nowadays as “bokeh”, a Japanese term).  A landscape shot at f/22 may have everything in focus from just in front of the photographer (perhaps 1 metre away) all the way to the horizon.

Aperture of course has to be traded off with shutter-speed.  Each increase in f/stop value (these are marked in half-intervals on your camera as the intervals which change when you choose to manually set your aperture on the “Av” or “Aperture Value” setting, and are universal) halves the amount of light which reaches the sensor, so you need to double your shutter-speed accordingly to keep the photograph correctly exposed.

The other effect aperture has is to increase or decrease the relative sharpness of that portion in focus.  A wide aperture (narrow depth of field) also increases the sharpness of that small portion of the photo in focus.  Conversely, a narrow aperture (large depth of field) such as a landscape with flowers in the foreground and mountains behind, may be in focus all the way from near to far, but the sharpness will be slightly less (although with a landscape you won’t notice the difference).

The final variable that comes in to play is that the actual depth of field is not set in stone, but rather is a function of the focal-length of the camera (that is, the distance from the lens that the central point of focus is)- hence the notation f/x where x is the aperture value.  So if you focus on something 100 metres away, the depth of field before and beyond that point along that z-axis will be much larger than if you focus on something 5 metres away.  In the above shot, the set of weights in my bedroom was about 50cm from my lens, shot at f/2.8.  You can see that roughly 15mm of the shot is in focus front-to-back, and the rest blurs out.  If I used the same focal length but focused on a tree out of my bedroom window 20 metres away, I could expect that a good metre or so either way from my point of focus would remain sharp before falling off.

As I said at the beginning, depth-of-field (DOF) is one of the less obvious applications of the regular photographic variables, but once mastered gives a great versatility and freedom in constructing portraits, landscapes, macro (close-up) and a variety of other photographs as well.

A couple more examples of photos using very shallow depth of field:

Tangle

Warburton, VIC.  January 2010.  Click for more detail.

The Kirk

My housemate bought a kitten the other week.  He’s a ragdoll, and he’s called Kirk.  Some obscure reference to the Gilmore Girls which I refuse to give air-time to.  He is none the less an extremely cute little bundle of fluff (even if he did soil the kitchen floor this evening).  These photos were taken of Kirk at about 13 weeks.  I’m not usually the cutesy, pink, hello-kitty, Anne-Geddes sort of photographer.  However, Kirk’s general adorableness made it very hard to resist snapping away some portraits.  And posting the results.

Thanks for indulging me.