Portrait Photography’s Power Posing Part I: The Components

Great article over on the DPS Blog (when don’t they have great articles?) regarding portrait photography and posing.

Some of the tips include positioning for head, arms, legs, hips, joints (”if it bends, bend it!”), and more!

Check out the “Portrait Photography’s Power Posing Part I: The Components” article by Christina Nichole over at the DPS blog!

Dr. Draw

Some of you may recall my post from a couple weeks ago about the opportunity I had to shoot Dr. Draw while they performed at The Works Art & Design Festival here in town. I’ve been talking to their manager and will be sending a CD of some of the shots for them to include in the gallery on their main site.

Much to my delight, I noticed a new comment on one of the images I took at the show.

The comment came from Eugene Draw himself:

I love this photo…
I would love to post it as the profile pic on the Dr. Draw myspace page actually all of the photos look just amazing….
you are truly a real deal photographer
e

Thanks for the comment Eugene, glad you liked the shot and hope to see it gracing your myspace page soon! I’ll chalk this one up to the published column…

Tags: B&W, Black & White, black and white, dr. draw, festival, musician, performance, performer, Portrait, Published, the works, the works art & design festival

10 More Tips for Stunning Portrait Photography

To follow up the 10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits post from the other day, DPS has posted 10 more tips:

11. Frame your subject
12. Go with a wide angle
13. Play with backgrounds
14. Change the format framing
15. Hold your camera on an angle
16. Take unfocused shots
17. Introduce movement
18. Experiment with subject expressions
19. Fill the frame
20. Find an interesting subject

Seems I’ve managed a couple of these in past self-portraits, good tips for the future!

Check out the 10 More Tips for Stunning Portrait Photography for more details!

Tags: DPS, Portrait, self-portrait, Tips

10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits

Being part of the 365 Days/threesixtyfive self-portrait a day for a year project, I found this article over on the DPS Blog today very interesting. Always looking for different ways to shoot myself, and I’m sure this will come in handy for portrait shooting as well!

How do you take Portraits that have the ‘Wow’ factor?

Today and tomorrow I want to talk about taking Portraits that are a little out of the box. You see it’s all very well and good to have a portrait that follows all the rules - but it hit me as I was surfing on Flickr today that often the most striking portraits are those that break all the rules.

I want to look at some ways to break out of the mold and take striking portraits by breaking (or at least bending) the rules and adding a little randomness into your portrait photography.

In a nutshell here are the ten points from the post today:

1. Alter your perspective
2. Play with eye contact
3. Break the rules of composition
4. Experiment with lighting
5. Move your subject out of their comfort zone
6. Shoot candidly
7. Introduce a prop
8. Focus upon one body part - get up close
9. Obscure part of your subject
10. Take a series of shots

My favorite technique, as you can see, is playing with and experimenting with light (photo above). I also find some of my best portraits are when shot candidly - as can be seen in the two photos below.

Be sure to head on over to the DPS Blog and read in detail 10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits!

Tags: 365, DPS, People, portraits, self-portraits, threesixtyfive, Tips

Pre-wedding shoot

Met up with Ashley and Matty to scout a possible location to take their wedding photos after the ceremony. While we were there we took a few shots - both for practice and to use on some Moo cards for the wedding.

The location was great, lots of green, a couple water spots - now we just need to make sure it’s sunny that day!

Any and all critique, comments, suggestions at this point would be most welcome of course!

Be sure to check out the rest of the set.

Tags: ashley, couple, engaged, engagement, matty, Portrait, wedding

5 Quick Tips to Keep You Motivated

Short little piece over at the Digital Photography School blog… as photographers we all get into funks or feel unmotivated from time to time… here’s 5 quick tips to keep you motivated!

1. Go for a walk
2. 5 in a half (take 5 photos in half a mile or kilometre)
3. Check past DPS articles
4. Be random on Flickr
5. Fill in the blank - what do you do?

As for number 5, I find that playing with other peoples photos helps get things cracking again. Below is a photo that I modified for the Stop, Collaborate and Listen. group on Flickr.

Check out the original 5 Quick Tips to Keep You Motivated post over at DPS.

Tags: bca, bigcrustyape, collaborate and listen, digital photography school, DPS, motivation, Portrait, scl, stop, Tips

DPP Solutions: Proper Contrast In Black-And-White

Been struggling somewhat with a B&W image conversion tonight, stumbled on this article written by Rob Sheppard over at Digital Photo Pro Magazine.

Contrast is critical to a properly printed black-and-white image. There’s no color to define and structure a photograph. It all must be done in the monochrome tonalities from black to white.

Contrast is no simple thing. Ansel Adams spends a lot of time talking about it in his classic book, The Print. Early in the book, he makes a statement that’s quite appropriate to today’s digital photographer, “Some photographers stress extreme black and white effects with very strong print contrasts … [while] others work for a softer effect … their power lies in the ‘seeing’ and the balance of values.”

Adams goes on to say that some photographers use contrast for contrast’s sake, regardless of the needs of the subject or scene. His point is simply that contrast shouldn’t be an arbitrary tool, but that there’s an optimum contrast that comes from the vision of the photographer connected to the needs of the image.

Here’s my original conversion to B&W of the image I was working on tonight:

After reading the article, I really didn’t come up with much better… maybe I am on the right track.

Check out how to use Proper Contrast In Black-And-White over at Digital Photo Pro Magazine.

Tags: ansel adams, B&W, black and white, contrast, digital photo pro, dpp, magazine, rob sheppard, Tips

6 Million People…

There are a ton of flickr groups out there - a ton! Came across this one through our threesixtyfive group - it’s called 6 Million People.

During World War II, Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered approximately six million Jews. According to the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, the Holocaust is the name used to define a systematic, bureaucratic, and state-sponsored campaign of persecution and murder. Beginning with racially discriminatory laws in pre-World War II Germany, the Nazi campaign expanded to the mass murder of all European Jews by the War’s end. The goal of this group is to collect 6 million pictures of different people, with one person in each picture, as a representation of the massive number of Jews the Nazis murdered during World War and to help remember both them and the other victims of Nazi Germany.

Although Jews were the primary victims of Nazi racism, others targeted for death included tens of thousands of Roma (Gypsies) and at least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled people. As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans persecuted and murdered millions of other people. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or died of starvation, disease, or maltreatment. The Germans killed tens of thousands of non-Jewish Polish intellectual and religious leaders, and deported millions of Polish and Soviet citizens for forced labor. From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, homosexuals and others deemed to be socially unacceptable were persecuted. Thousands of political dissidents (including Communists, Socialists, and trade unionists) and religious dissidents (such as Jehovah’s Witnesses) were also targeted. Many of these individuals died as a result of incarceration and maltreatment.

The United Nations General Assembly reaffirms that ‘the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.”

Please help us remember the holocaust dutifully and respectfully by adding your photos– of you, your loved ones and others– to our pool. Add as many photos as you want, but please submit no more than 1 picture of any person, so that in the end we will have close to 6 million pictures of people, with a different person the subject of each picture. It’s going to take a long time to add up to 6 million pictures—that’s 200,000 Flickr pages with 30 images each—but our goal is 6 years or less. When we complete the project, it will be a memorial to those who died, and will provide us a with a way to visualize all those people. Thank you for helping and supporting us in our goal.

Sources: www.ushmm.org & www.un.org

The rules are simple:

1. Please respect the tone of this group and its members.
2. Post as many photos as you like.
3. Each photo should include exactly 1 person
4. Please submit no more than 1 picture of any person.
5. Only pictures taken of you, by you, or by friends & family
6. No porn
7. At some point, pictures in this project may be used non-commercially outside of Flickr to help promote the group and in keeping with the spirit of the group. No one’s photo will be prominently used without their explicit permission.
8. (Optional) Tag your photos “6 Million People” or 6MillionPeople.
9. (Optional) Please add lots & lots of photos that fit the group rules. We’ll need 60,000 members to add 100 pictures each; it’ll be hard, but we can do it.

Sounds awesome, I’m in. If I’ve taken a photo of you, chances are I’ll be adding you to the group. You can view the photos I’m adding at my 6 Million People set.

Tags: 6 million people, flickr, portraits, self-portraits

pagan - flickr Fave of the Day

Been a bit slack lately when it comes to posting a Fave of the Day… here’s todays… daneli has such great skills with Photoshop and her post production work on her images… outstanding!

pagan, originally uploaded by daneli.

Tags: daneli, flickr Fave of the day, photoshop, Portrait

Whiskerino 07 - flickr Fave of the Day

Saw this on my flickr feed… this guy is genius! Do yourself a favor and check out his set…

Day 11, originally uploaded by dubstyle.

Tags: dubstyle, flickr Fave of the day, portraits, self-portraits