Portrait photography
Portrait or portraiture photography is a type of photography which captures or small group of peoples, where the face/faces are the main feature in the image. The main aim of this type of photography is to portray the personality, mood of the subject that is being photographed.
A portrait normally consists of the subject looking directly at the camera.
In portrait photography the focus is normally on the person’s eyes and eyes, this is usually done on a sharp focus to get all of the detail in, this then allows the less important features to be on a soft focus and not have the attention drawn to them.
Chris Gloag
Chris Gloag is a professional portrait photographer who shoots portraits for the editorial, corporate and advertising market. Chris produces not just photos for the rich and famous but also for the general public who pay for self portraits.
Michael Roberts Williams
(Above Michael Roberts Williams)
Michael Williams is well known for his portraits of musicians, including people like: The Killers, Ellie Goulding, Pixie Lott etc. He doesn’t just focus on musicians, he is also known for photographing people from film and sport.
Including the portraits that he has created for magazines, he has also created images for record labels and some commercial clients which include Adidas, Phillips etc.
Photo-shoot notes
Guitar/Base:
Studio picture including real life snake and fake blood.
Landscape: Somewhere quite run down and derelict, possibly somewhere like RMW Pauls that has been abandoned for a while.
Only one of my subjects (Oscar) wants colourful images, my other subject (Chris) I will be photographing wants a variety of colour and black and white images.
Both subjects want studio shots, these will be kept as simple as possible as I don’t want the focus to be taken away from the instrument and their musician. For one of my subject they have asked for some live shot to be taken so i will take these whilst they are rehearsing or possibly even having a gig etc, this all depends on whether they have a gig scheduled anything soon.
Edited images
Chris
Oscar
Music portrait evaluation
Overall I really liked the final images that I edited for both of my artists. All of the images feature exactly what my artists wanted features in their photos, I have added several things to make them look just that little bit more interesting.
For my first artist; he only wanted photos taken out on location. So for think I took him out at night and took him to one of the highest buildings in the town; which I had previously gotten approval on from the person who owns it saying that we were allowed to shoot up there. As it was evening when I took these images it gave the photos more of a powerful feel about them, and with all of the added light that was coming from all the buildings, cars and street lights in the surrounding area it added a nice effect to it.
When it came to actually editing the images not much had to be added because there was so much happening in the background/surrounding area that if I added anything to it then it could result in it look cluttered or possibly even a bit of an eye soar, so instead I decided to merge two of the images together so that one of the images was overlapping the other image. The two images that we decided on where images that had to different looks about them, I almost wanted to portray his alter ego, meaning that one of them shows you what he is like when performing, and then the other one show a more solemn and calm person; what his personality is like in real life.
For my second artist we only did a studio shoot. I started off using different types of lighting: starting off dark and then gradually adding more lighting to it.
On the images that I edited I tried to keep them as natural as possible; this is what he required. In the image that did not have a quote in it I made the whole image black and white and I then carefully erased the black that and white that was layering the guitar so that this was the only colourful section that featured that was in the image itself. Doing this resulted in the image standing out and which worked well as it ended up not making the image look flat/boring. I left the image without a quote because I felt that if I had added one then it wouldn’t look right; so this would have resulted in the quote looking out of place and ruining the whole of the image.
The image that had the Shakespeare quote in it was also black and white, there was a lamp in the shot; I was unsure what to do with this so I decided to make it look as if there was a single spotlight on him and because the look on his face was so high in concentration it looked as if he was performing. For the text because it was a Shakespearian quote, I decided to go along with this concept and have the font of the text look like old English; how it was written back in that era, I also made the text a dark grey so it went along with the colours I had chosen to use: this is because if I used a bright vibrant colour it would look out of place and could result in it not having the same effect.
For my second artist we only did a studio shoot. I started off using different types of lighting: starting off dark and then gradually adding more lighting to it.
On the images that I edited I tried to keep them as natural as possible; this is what he required. In the image that did not have a quote in it I made the whole image black and white and I then carefully erased the black that and white that was layering the guitar so that this was the only colourful section that featured that was in the image itself. Doing this resulted in the image standing out and which worked well as it ended up not making the image look flat/boring. I left the image without a quote because I felt that if I had added one then it wouldn’t look right; so this would have resulted in the quote looking out of place and ruining the whole of the image.
