Exercise: Portrait - Scale and Setting.

For this first exercise I need to take a portrait, the idea being that I will end up with four different scales, from cropped in close to the persons head to a full length either sitting or standing.  I am starting off my research by reading a book I have had for some time called 'Jeff Smith's guide to head and shoulders portrait photography' the details of which are listed under my reading page.  Although this book is predominately about head and shoulder photography there are several examples showing the torso and also some full length shots. My attention was drawn to  a series of photographs depicting a young girl in jeans with her foot and arm against the wall. This gave me some idea of positioning and also cropping for the torso photograph in the correct place. I have also looked at 'The Art of Children's Portrait Photography' again a book I already owned but I found it interesting to look at the portraits of children taken outdoors and the poses used to make the portrait natural.


In the course notes it is suggested that to begin with I photograph someone I know. With this in mind I start the process of deciding who I can ask to 'sit' for me, and also where can I photograph them, do I want it outside or indoors, although I have a small home studio I don't really want to use it for this exercise.  The two ideas I have at the moment are my husband who is a driving instructor I could photograph him in his car or maybe standing beside it. I can see a few problems with this though in the positioning of the crop for the torso shot, it might not work with the car.  The second one is to use one of my grandchildren, but again I can see a problem of getting them to stay still and not pull faces, I will try both ideas and if I am not happy I will try something else.

I finally decided to photograph my mum n a recent visit to my house. 
She had been playing with the dog and was taking a few minutes break relaxing and looking through one of my books and drinking a coffee. I liked that in most of the shots she looks so relaxed , although she is a little nervous looking in a couple but I think most people find it hard to smile to order unless they are models.

 

This close cropped in one took my a few attempts to get correct I wasn't happy with a full on face shot as I felt it was too unflattering, I finally asked her to look downwards at the book and used a focal length of 200mm, so I wasn't right on top of her when I took the shot. 

 

 

For the head and shoulder shot I asked her to look at me again I had several attempts to get what I wanted,  I used a  focal length of 48 mm and moved around until I was fairly happy.

 

For the Torso shot I wanted it to look natural and so I got her to look down at the book then called her and took the shot when she looked up. This has a focal length of 42mm.

The final shot is a full length one, as my mum is quite tiny I preferred the look of her having her legs up on the sofa, otherwise it looked a bit unbalanced. This has a focal length of 18mm.

Having reviewed all four photographs I think that although the face is the most prominent part of the first three photographs I feel that the head and shoulders looks too 'formal' or too 'posed'. I also decided to crop the first photograph even more to remove some of the red sofa.

This is a much stronger photograph.

The cropped torso and full body shots are both quite relaxed shots and I think viewers would see these as such. I chose to have the hands covered and I think this works better than having them on show.

I think the background has worked quite well with the blue blinds and the blue top, the red of the sofa compliments well.