Exercise: An active portrait

The brief for this exercise is to take an active portrait, the idea being to show the expressions on the subjects face rather than go into too much detail about what they are actually doing.


I was quite lucky with this I was asked by my hairdressers if I would help them out and take some photographs for one of the hairdressers assessments, where she needed photographs taken of the hair make up and styling she had done on her own model.  I happily agreed to help them out if they would help me in return, something the hairdresser was happy to do.

I decided I wanted to photograph her as she worked and hoped that she would be so busy concentrating on what she was doing she would forget about me, I think she managed to do that quite well. 

After many attempts I finally decided on this one, as you can see the concentration on her face and that she has forgotten all about the camera and is just busy doing her job.

It is quite dark in the hairdressers which worked in my favour slightly as I didn't want too much of the surroundings to be seen, the settings I used were F7.1 1/125's shutter speed iso 200 and a flash white balance. The focal length was 22mm.

I try to keep post production of my work to a minimum if possible and all I did for this photograph was to crop it down to remove some of the excess background, then made very slight adjustments to the brightness and levels in the layers palette. I then flatten the layers and applied the unsharp mark.