in the age of selfies and smart phone portrait mode, the general public's concept of what a portrait is has become extremely simplified: make sure the subject's face is the prominent focus, the background has that "blurry" look, then throw a filter on it and you're good!
 
…okay so while yes, technically that is a portrait (selfies are not. selfies are garbage.) there is so much more to what a portrait can be.
 
as a photographer, attacking portraiture is almost one of the biggest challenges you can take. a portrait can be as simple as a subject and a plain backdrop to some elaborate on-location shoot with a team of people doing hair and makeup, setting up strobe lights or soft boxes, dealing with the elements, creating a set, etc.
 
there is a weird responsibility with portraiture that i feel you don’t necessarily have with most other forms of photography. if you're a high fashion photographer shooting models for a magazine or something, this responsibility is heightened.
realism.
you want to portray your subject the way they truly are; not just in their physical manifestation, but their emotional makeup as well. you want to tell their "story", per say. is it difficult? not entirely. but little things in a portrait can completely change its vibe, be it the way it was edited, how the person posed, or just a misstep taken in post.

this shot of paige has become my favorite photo i've ever taken. not just portrait, photo. what most people don’t realize is that this was about 3 years in the making. this photo defined my style to the t.

while i've been shooting for about 8 years now, this 'signature' style of shooting started in 2017. i just recently re-kindled a friendship with an ex-girlfriend amanda…i shouldn't have, and i know that…but i was dumb… okay, let's move on and not make fun of me. i can feel your eyes rolling.

the initial intention of this photoshoot with amanda was to get a head-shot for her so that she could paint a self-portrait, using my shot as her guide. that portion of the shoot turned out ok, but i wasn't loving it. it wasn't 'creative' enough to satisfy my interest. i'm not as interested in a headshot as much as i am a portrait.

straight away, you can see how emotion gets involved, and not even from the model's side, but my side. when something feels cookie cutter, it sucks the life out of a shoot for me. i want there to be something deeper in the picture that entices the viewer, not just a pretty face.

the setup for the shoot was really simple:

uncentered ms paint ftw

uncentered ms paint ftw

crude mock up, but you get the idea. the subject was the blue circle, i'm the red arrow, and the yellow triangles are three soft boxes.

side note - soft boxes are very different than strobes. strobes are like flashes. they aren't necessarily lit the entire time and at the point of firing, they flash as if to freeze the frame of the shot (me explaining how a flash works as if you didn't know). soft box lighting is a constant source of light shining through some kind of opaque screen to soften the bulb's intensity, casting a nice even, soft light on the subject. i much prefer the soft box style, but when you're surrounded by them like this setup, there are no shadows, no contrast, and the subject gets that perfectly lit look. not my thing.

so i had an idea. i decided to turn off the center and left soft boxes, stood where the left soft box was, and had amanda turn towards me with her head, chest towards center-right. here's what we got:
Canon EOS 5D MkIII EF24-70mm f/2.8L II USM
ƒ/3.5 44.0 mm 1/100 sec ISO 1250
at the time, this is exactly what i wanted. a little more contrast and mood, some more emotion coming out of the eyes, a more artistic edit as opposed to what a sears (r.i.p.) portrait session would get you. but looking back on it over the years, i noticed so many issues with this shot.

...so bad...

i was on to something, but it needed work. i could tell this portrait style worked for my artistic tastes, but things weren't clicking yet. unfortunately, i really didn’t have a chance to establish it further because at the time i was working in ct and i didn’t have any "model friends" to work with. i did try shooting myself, but that was so much of a hassle to play around with…taking a portrait of yourself is literally the most annoying thing to do.
 
but about a year later, i got another crack at it. my very good friend and favorite client angel vivaldi wanted me to shoot something. long story short, the shots were going to be composited to make it look like he was floating his guitar in space. longer story short...i sucked at it (just like with amanda). i don’t thing editorial shoots are my thing. but after hours of shooting, i said "hey…let me just try something real quick."

the setup was similar to that of amanda's shoot, but with like 6 soft boxes…just a stupid amount of light. again, i shut all of them off but 1, and we got this:

Canon EOS 5D MkIII EF24-70mm f/2.8L II USM 

ƒ/5.6 28.0 mm 1/160 sec ISO 2000

so much better…like…ugh so much better. the editing style on this was the start of me finding my signature style that i use today - raised blacks, dropped whites so that all of the extreme tones look softer and "greyer" if that makes sense.
there are little things i wish i did differently on this (like have more of the guitar body color showing as opposed to the light reflection taking over much of it), but honestly…i was and still am really happy with this one. angel was able to use this shot ad infinitum which is all i could ever ask for as a photographer.

but again...still not satisfied. and that was in 2018! when new years 2020 hit, i finally had enough of waiting. i really wanted to make this work and figure it out. the previous 2 shoots had a separate purpose and this shot was an afterthought.

so, i did what any desperate photographer would do, and hit up my awesome and gorgeous and coolest friend paige to try this out.
with zero hesitation(...ok maybe a little hesitation cause the day we shot this it was snowing like a mofo), paige was down and we got to work.

i...well, we came prepared. paige did full hair and makeup, i brought only 1 soft box and i pre-planned the general idea on lighting angles in relation to her body. in theory this one should be much better than the other two.

and it 1000% was.

Canon EOS 5D MkIII EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM

ƒ/5.6 120.0 mm 1/160 sec ISO 800

let's start with the obvious. hair. perfect. hair. a little of it is because paige has a lot of blonde in her hair, but the amount of detail you can see with the lighting and styling is perfect.
next up, the eyes. i did a quick tutorial on how to "sharpen" eyes (there's a great in depth one on youtube) but what's important is that the addition of highlight lines in the eyes wasn’t overdone. it's stronger opposite the catch light (code word for where the light source shows up in her eyes) and weakens as it moves closer to it. the exposure in her eyes is also much better than my previous efforts to where you can see the natural color of her iris. this sharpening step isn't necessary, but i tend to do it a lot in portraiture (especially if the subject has lighter colored eyes) to draw even more attention to them. it's super interesting because if you were to zoom in on her eye, you would see photoshop paint strokes on them, but when you zoom out, they become nonexistent and looks natural.
ok gear. i love gear and nerd out over gear a lot.
when shooting portraits, a lot of photographers tend to gravitate toward certain focal lengths: 35mm, 50mm, 85mm are the most common. rules of thumb - the smaller the number, the more you can capture in a shot (i.e. wider field of view) but your subject may also tend to stretch a bit. the higher the number, the more focused and compressed things look (narrow field of view), yet your subject looks squished or thin. for context. your eyes see at roughly 42mm naturally.
**not exactly 42mm, cause biology and science. i'm not boring you with those details now, but google it. it’s fascinating**
 
amanda and angel were shot with a lens that was 24-70mm, so semi wide to semi narrow range. i believe both were shot close to 50mm. this one was shot with a 70-200mm lens at 120mm. i tried to compensate the compression by standing as far away as i could from paige, but i really wanted that honed in look. even though the backdrop is plain, i feel like the lens choice further makes you focus on paige more than the previous 2 efforts. that could be me trying to bullshit myself into thinking i did something smart, but i don't know…i think it works.

this was the first time doing this style shot where i used my 'finished' (nothing is ever finished) signature edit, so the coloring was more natural. it almost gives off a "painting" over a "photograph" vibe. again, the extreme tones are subdued to soften the image, but not loose in the contrasts and sharpness. i think it took me 3 hours to edit this one…
 
let’s just hope it doesn’t take me another 3 years to shoot something like this again.

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