Portrait Photographs

A work situation portrait .

An Actress's publicity Photograph

Portraits of a couple of Tv commercial directors. Direct light and different colour temperature lights make an interesting mood.

Students at work for an educational institution

A young Tv star for a magazine

A Magazine editor

Portrait photography is always one of the main parts of any photography business and mine is no exception . While many photographers might have one particular style of portrait , generally most professionals might have to work in many different styles to cater to different clients. There could be the executive or business portrait , the actor/actress portrait, the candid portrait or the illustrative or character portrait.

Portrait photography can be done in a studio with controlled light , or in a location that says something about the subject ( environmental portraiture) . It can have studio light used or natural light , or a combination of the two . The options are endless and that is even before you get into any kind of digital manipulation.

Different clients might have unique requirements . For example : a magazine might require relaxed "natural" portraiture where a business might need more formal photography,

Avertising and photography for magazines and book always needs to take into account page shapes and also space for titles and text, and because of that it needs to be remembered that

the photograph in itself may not look like the most brilliant composition , but when text or titles is added then they complete the image as was intended

Group portrait photography 2

This image was of one of the people working at the kiwi spit roast barbecue king company, a photography shoot I did for a commercial mayonnaise brand promotion . I used the wonderful 85mm 1.2 canon lens to control the backgrounds with its wide aperture and ability to make interesting things out of areas that may not look so good in focus - of course the wide aperture also gives the opportunity to be more flexible in low light areas so there is less fiddling around with lights etc making the subjects nervous.
Continuing on with the people theme , this was taken earlier this year as a portrait of the production team for a cookbook I was working on . It was carefully staged to look natural - I prefer to work that way so usually pick the location and relax the subjects into it . I used available light and a little bit of flash to compensate for the overhead lighting . I was Pleased with the result as commercial kitchens can look a bit grim sometimes.

Group portrait photography 1

I photographed this group of property agents in Epsom the other day out side their offices in a prominent building of the area. It was a great opportunity to do something a bit different from the regular corporate shot and also to use black and white. The brief was to have them moving and not looking too static , and to fit a panoramic format as that was the size of the promotional piece they were planning. a quick visit to the site and some initial planning to work out the angle. Then it took a little direction to get them moving the right way and the biggest issue was yelling over the noise of the traffic! We were all very pleased with the outcome.

How retouch a picture 2

In this image , I used retouching to add to the numbers of people available for the image. This was an image created for a Pr company to publicise 250 years of Guinness stout.

The ideas was to create a publicity stunt where 250 people would assemble themselves on a field in the form of a giant Guinness glass. Unfortunately on the day numbers came up short so as a publicity stunt for press it didn't really happen. However with a bit of retouching and creation of additional people to boost numbers a useful illustrative piece could be created - so the day didn't go wasted!

In this case I was down the rankings for photographers as the press people got the pole position so not having the right angle created some extra work. It wasn't a particularly simple job to retouch and took a day of intense people creation so not to have too much repetition in the image - The human eye is very good at picking up repeating patterns so it was important there not be any looking exactly the same.

On a more technical note - I shot the scene with both Canon 35mm and Hasselblad medium format digital cameras. The medium format camera gave me some additional colour depth and field flatness ( because I was able to use a comparatively longer lens ) which made finalising the retouching much easier.

Below you can see a few of the before and after shots .

Retouching - lets fix it in the computer!

Sometimes the ability to retouch photographs is quite a relief. I'm not really a big fan of retouching , more of a photographic purist and like to get things right in the camera . But if you need it to tell the story , it is essential.

This was a shoot I did with John Edgar(www.johnedgar.co.nz) , currently New Zealand's premiere sculptor. He had produced a series of sculptures that centred around his Scottish ancestry. Pieces of New Zealand and Scottish stone were bonded together to represent both nations.

Originally we had this idea we could take them out to photograph in the landscape in various locations, but weather and the problems of moving pieces of 100kg stone , along with the impending deadlines of having to ship them to Scotland for an exhibition precluded this possibility.

While we were able to produce studio photography on location in John's Studio with few issues , getting the works out of the studio to anywhere was a problem. I suggested retouching them in to landscape photographs I had taken around the area previously. It added an extra illustrative dimension to the exhibition catalogue that it lacked . So technology creates a solution - if you plan to use it.

You can see the pillow sculpture where it started in the studio, the creek it is lying in was created out of a much smaller creek , the other backgrounds were shot as they appear , on large format film .