Workshop Experience : Photography Studies College Week #7
This week in our Wednesday session we focussed on one of our end of course portfolio areas - Portraits. Scott our tutor took us through the two category areas of portraiture - Camera Aware and Camera Unaware. Being a professional photographer for one of Melbourne's largest media agencies, Scott is well placed to talk us through how you approach camera aware portraiture, how to get rapport with the model or subject at hand, and how to get people to portray as natural projection of themselves as possible for the frame you want to capture. As Scott said, "a portrait is merely a reflection of the photographers rapport with the subject at the end of the day".
Camera Aware tips from Scott :
- background image information is important and what you want to do with it (blur it out, incorporate it, back/middle/fore, etc. See above image by Mann.
- eliminate any distractions in the frame by positioning and angle of camera
- harmony in a portrait overrides other "rules" of frames such as thirds
- when working with a subject, before the shoot let people know of your ideas and plans if any, where you will be positioning them roughly, already have your general settings for your camera set up, etc
- during the shoot make as much conversation as you can, relax the subject, get to know some insights that you can leverage during the shoot, be confident, positive, provide feedback ongoing, etc
- body language determines personality so leverage your observations as much as you can during the shoot
Scott then went on to talk us through Photojournalism techniques and the genre of single image story telling. We also look din to creating photo essay, and the main building blocks being :
- Establishing/Intro shot
- Medium frame/People based shot
- Close Up/Detail frame
- Portrait/Environmental Portrait
- Interaction/Action frame
- Signature/Decisive moment frame
We also discussed the thoughts and views of Susan Sontag in her book where she states that photographers are always imparting their views through the images they take, an that plays out in photojournalism as well.
Scott finished up by saying all photography involves people, be it aware or otherwise, and that taking great people frames is the key to expressing yourself as a photographer. The challenge has been set !
Canon 6D with new nifty 50mm prime, ISO125, f/16, 1/60 panning
Next we reviewed and discussed each others attempts at panning images. Some really excellent results came from the class i thought. Mine are above. I struggled with this technique initially, by not having the shutter speed set slow enough. I switched to a 50mm lens and lowered down to 1/50 and 1/60 and got some half decent results on bikes and slow moving cars. But it is certainly more about practise than luck, so will stick at it on some differing moving objects to see what results can be achieved.
I unfortunately didn't make the Thursday session - my first miss ! Having read thru the online notes (a great aspect of this PSC course is that most notes are on line grouped under each week, so you can certainly review ahead of time, as well as catch up if you happen to miss a session. The internal website they run is also full of additional information, reference videos, and access to other great photography resources.) I see that Lucia took the class through more elements around The Frame, this time exploring Frame within Frame, the Rule of Thirds, and Golden Mean. More to come on these topics. Finally, we also had to submit a few images that explored the first session we had around the elements of design. Her are mine for Lines, Placement (symmetrical, edge of frame) and Weight. Until next time !
Line images via DJI Drone. Placement and Weight images with Leica Q, ISO800, f/7.1, 1/5000