Thursday 31 January 2013

Exercise: Scale and Setting

In this exercise we are tasked to produce four portrait images. These images are to be varied by the area captured of the sitter, starting with a close cropped frame of the face, a head and shoulders shot, the head and torso and the full figure.

For this exercise I chose all images in the sitting position using natural light through a south facing window to the right of the sitter. I then used a large gold reflector to reflect the light back to fill the sitters right hand side. This I felt worked very well warming up the images producing an even light. I wish I had varied the distance of the reflector a little more to perhaps get some darker images, one to remember for next time.

I tried a number of poses most of them didn't work out that well so this was a good learning curve for me. In the first set of images it was pretty straight forward as there is not much to focus on. I chose the following image that seemed more intimate with eyes off camera, the finger works well here adding more interest to the portrait.

The next shot panned back a little and this time I selected an image with the sitter looking at the camera, again making use of the hands.The eyes are very strong in this image and certainly the main focal point.


The third image pans further back to get in the torso. Again I used a similar hand gesture but this time tried to get a more relaxed view. The second arm folded seems to work well, the only real mistake I have here is the lamp stand in the back ground coming out of the head; I must be more aware of things like this for next time.


The final image is the full body image and for this I chose a more formal seating position with the hands placed on the knees, one taken from Patrick Earle's portraits. The background seemed more of a formal setting so I believed this would complement the portrait.


This was an interesting exercise which has made me think more and given me ideas of what works and what doesn't and things to look out for next time.