This page will soon be an ever-expanding pro photo BLOG as soon as I figure out that software. Meanwhile, here are my somewhat compressed, accumlated thoughts on the photographic portrait that differentiate it from other areas of photography. All material herein is the property of Ron Finley ©2006 and cannot be reproduced without written permission.
Thoughts on Studio Portraiture for the (semi) serious photographer.
Lots and lots has been written about the nexus between the photographer’s shutter finger and the subject’s true persona as it flashes before the lens, bubbling up from some inner depth to bare their true humanity, inner demons, childish innocence, etc. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called it “un moment parfait” (a perfect moment). This was, of course, before cameras could shoot ten frames a second. It is true that a portrait photographer often has to cajole, cheer-lead, even resort to threats and bribery to guide their subject to the “parfait”, that is the subject for another chapter. What is written here is far more fundamental, i.e., it concerns getting a nicely lit, technically competent “sitting”.
The Bum Shot.
Ideally, in shooting a portrait (be it of aunt Mildred or The Queen of England) you want to make most every shot technically usable, as Murphy dictates that it is always the one bad shot that captured the perfect moment. Pro photographers of sports, action, fashion, and photojournalists (including paparazzi) routinely generate unusable frames as they try to anticipate motion and the frame and position of their subjects and get fooled by the unexpected. But in studio portraiture, there are few excuses for the photographer blowing a shot. Bad exposures, soft focus, blurred frames, and mis-framing will end a career fast. Most of these can be eliminated by shooting with a tripod, and at a high enough shutter speed to minimize subject motion and a high enough aperture to cover minor focus errors. As a general rule, you will want to shoot at a middle aperture (f 8 or so) and at a shutter speed not less than the reciprocal of the lens focal length (i.e. if your shooting with a 125mm focal length lens, the shutter speed should be no less than a 1/125). Stick to this until you know what you’re doing and you’ll substantially reduce unwanted blur* and soft-focus pictures. Shoot with multiple strobe lighting and you should eliminate all of these. More on this later.
Camera considerations in Portraiture
First, a few (kind of arbitrary) definitions.
Studio Portrait: a shot of a person from the waist up illuminated by artificial light.
Studio: an indoor place with a bit of room with an electrical outlet, like a photo studio, ballroom, or a garage with a ten foot ceiling (hey, I have one).
Shutter speed, aperture, lens focal length, depth-of-field and the relationships between these things. (Note: If you don’t have a working grasp of these concepts, you need to do some more reading before you go on. Here’s a link to a beginner’s interpretation of these things that will not overwhelm a novice. http://inluminent.com/2005/12/14/digital-photography-101-aperture/) In this discussion, lens focal lengths will be used on the basis of a full-frame film or digital 35mm camera platform. Equivalent focal length charts for larger or smaller format cameras can be found on line (http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/digital-camera-sensor-size.htm is useful for digital only formats) .
Film or Digital?
Both work just fine, and film photographers swear by the skin tones of the new Fuji NPH (ISO 400), but the workflow of dealing with labs, contact sheets, test prints and especially the difficulty of retouching, compared with the immediacy, lower cost, and simplicity of digital have made the latter the public’s expectation. If you have inherited a nice film Hassie from your uncle and want to use it, fine, but in this brief paper, we’ll deal with a totally digital process .
Camera choice:
If you don’t already have one, you will need a camera that can shoot in BOTH the manual exposure mode and the manual focus mode. You’ll need the option of turning one or both of these features off and in fact, most blown shots are made by people using these automatic features and not really understanding the limitations of them.
The ideal camera is a digital single-lens reflex (SLR) camera in which, just like it’s film counterpart, you view the shot through the same lens that the camera uses to capture the image. All digital SLRs have interchangeable lenses, video outs, and image monitors that will display a variety of useful features like histograms, focus magnifiers, and over-exposure warnings. Most important, they all offer capturing RAW IMAGES which are essential for a variety of reasons I will explain in a bit. All of the SLRS made by Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Minolta, Fuji, and Olympus in the 6-8 megapixel range are just fine, but I would pass over the entry level cameras like the Canon digital Rebel if you can afford it, as they are a bit cheesy and have fewer controls and most importantly, a PC flash out. All of these cameras will generate a high-resolution 8 x 10 portrait. If you want to offer bigger prints, like 11 x 14 to 16 x 20, you’ll need a camera like those offered by Canon and Nikon in the 12 – 16 megapixel range, which are more expensive. Another consideration when buying a camera is to check the lenses available for it, both by the manufacturer and after-market manufacturers. If you go with Canon or Nikon (or Fuji which uses Nikon), you not only have a lot of choices, but can also be reasonably sure that your lenses will work on their new models for the foreseeable future. You really won’t need more than two lenses for your camera, and you should avoid changing lenses on a digital SLR often, particularly out doors, as digital sensors are electrostatic and if you forget to turn off the camera power when changing lenses (a must), your sensor will become instantly filthy and they don’t clean easily.
Lens choice for the studio portrait:
The focal length of your lens will vary by the desired mood you seek. Comic portraits can be shot with a very wide lens (18mm or even a fish-eye), but generally, wide lenses exaggerate the features of a homo sapiens in a way that ends careers quickly. Conversely, medium telephoto lenses (80-200mm) compress these features in a flattering way and are what is often used in a pro studio. The problem is that the longer lenses make for a more critical focusing and the chance for blowing more shots, but depending on your light sources, this problem can be solved.
Tripods for portraiture:
Unless you’re using a square format camera like Diane Arbus’s Rolleiflex, you’ll want to orient your camera to the “portrait”(as opposed to the “landscape”) mode. This requires a tripod that allows you to rotate the camera 90° and still have separate control over the pan and tilt functions. Some of the higher end tripods have “one-touch” controls for quickly adjusting height and level, with a crank boom for fine-tuning your shot. Another option I use occasionally is to use a viscous-damped video tripod head with a separate (inexpensive) 90° tilt-plate and remote shutter release. This latter approach allows you to pan smoothly with the action when necessary. In any event, you should (generally) use a tripod for a portrait.
Lighting a portrait.
Lighting the portrait is the main deal. The choice of the instrument and the “shaping” of its light are the key to a successful portrait as well as any other kind of shot. Here are the necessary lights you will use. The “key light” (modeling light) is the first consideration. How hard or soft it is and where it is put determine the drama and beauty of the shot. The “fill light” in portraiture is more often not a light but simply a white “bounce” card a few feet away from the subject that reduces the intensity of the shadows created by the key light to a desired degree. In a normal head shot, I set the fill to around on and a half stops less than the key. In a very dramatic shot, the fill could be three stops less than the key. Unlike film, in digital photography, SOME degree of fill is always desirable to prevent noise in the dark regions. Last is the “Background light”. Whether you are using a piece of seamless paper or shelf of books or a graffiti-festooned brick wall, ya gotta light it in a way that compliments the subject. So far we have a two instrument set up with a bounce card. Now here are a couple of optional lights most photographers use. The “back light” sometimes called a “hair” or “separation” light comes from a high angle behind the subject and is generally slightly more or less hot than the key light, depending on the need. I actually consider this a necessary light at all times, but it can look pretty fake if it’s not used right. Lastly, there is the “kicker” or effects light. These can be a dramatic “cross key” set 180° from the key, or a hot side light often with a colored gel for drama. This is a theatrical look and should be well tested before you start using it for real.
How do you determine how much of each light to use? You could eyeball it. With a digital camera’s monitor screen and the histogram you can come pretty close. Better is to use an “incident” light meter. These read the amount of light falling on the subject as opposed to the camera meter which is a “reflectance” meter, which reads the light reflected off the subject. These meters usually work with both flash and continuous lights, so they have a wide use. You will quickly be thinking in key-to-fill ratios.
Hot Lights or Strobes?
There are two distinct approaches and considerable budget considerations.
"Hot lights” as they are called these days are continuous filament lights like quartz-halide movie lights, tungsten filament flood lights, and even a bright floor lamp with a silk shade fall into this category. Many years ago, I found that a large Japanese paper lantern with a two hundred watt bulb dangling inside was an amazing instrument you could buy for under five bucks (then). Lighting with hot lights can be very creative and allows you to see what you’re doing. One caveat for the beginner: unless you’re planning on a black-and white shot, beware of mixing color temperature sources. Household tungsten bulbs have a very low color temperature( 2500K), quartz movie lights are 3200K and ambient daylight can vary from 5000K to 10,000K. In English, these produce light ranging from orange to blue. With color film, using anything other than the recommended color temperature for the film was a formula for disaster. Now with digital cameras that are capable of recording RAW images, you can again work with household lights as you can manipulate the color temperature on your computer after the fact, even mixing temperatures with multiple processing to the image. Note: cameras shooting in the .jpg or .tif format will not allow this post-control.
In any event, hot lights can be cheap, creative, and will allow you can see what you’re doing. On the down side, if the light source is bright enough to stop motion and give you a decent aperture, it is probably going to be uncomfortable for the subject and, except for seasoned models and actors, this will show in the result. If the light is comfortable and beautiful to eye, you’re probably going to end up with exposure times too long to stop any motion (like 1/30 or slower) and very wide apertures (like 2.8). This shouldn’t stop you, just know that you’ll get a lot of NG shots.
Strobes (or Studio Flash)
There are many photographers that are intimidated by the mere mention of off-camera lighting with multiple flashes as they can’t see what they’re getting. And then there was the issue of not being able to shoot in motorback bursts (like photographers do in TV dramas) because of the strobes recycle time. True, it was tough to see what you were doing back in the film days. We used tons of Polaroid film in our Hasselblad to judge our lighting by, and we had the good kind of strobes with powerful modeling lights. Eventually, a photographer got to know his/her lights well enough to know what to expect. Even with today’s digital monitors, it can be dicey, as these things have very little to do with what you will see in a print. But the advantages of strobes way outweigh these disadvantages , especially for a portrait, the major one being the tremendous power even the cheapest strobes have compared with hot lights. For example, a 500 watt continuous quartz light (which us hot and uncomfortable) puts out 1/8 the light of a Vivitar 285 strobe which sells for under a hundred bucks!
The reality is, if you are the least bit serious about shooting portraits, take a deep breath and buy some strobes. There are several types available depending on your budget and the area you need to cover, which in portraiture isn’t much. All strobes work by using an electronic capacitor that builds up a very high voltage which is realeased in a mini-bolt of lightening inside the strobe’s “flash tube”. The intensity of the light is controlled by the length of time the flash is “on”, not the brightness, which remains constant. The power of a strobe is measured in watt-seconds. The larger units have substantial quartz“modeling” lights. NOTE: any strobe used in “off-camera” lighting must have it’s power controllable manually in a minimum or 1 stop incriments. Another note here: a strobes recycle time is dependent primarily on what power setting you are using. In our studio work with models, we never shoot above 1/4 of the strobe’s power, making it possible to shoot up to a half-dozen shots in a burst if necessary, as it is in action portraits, hair ads, or fashion.
Camera-mount strobes that come with camera shoe attachments, like the Vivitar 285. (These are not to be confused with the expensive ON CAMERA models made by Nikon and Canon which are totally designed for DTTL auto exposures and CANNOT be used in multi-flash work). These can be used in manual modes for OFF the camera for portraiture on light stands with little shoe adapters to attach them. They are internally battery powered with optional a/c power supplies. They are connected to the camera and each other via pc sync cables, or in a wireless mode, using a camera strobe as a trigger and “peanut” sensor slaves to fire the strobes. These are super-cheap and dependable, ideal for an entry-level portrait shooter, and always have use even after you upgrade to more robust units. But they have their limitations, in that they have no “modeling” lights and recycle to full power relatively slowly ( three seconds or more). There are after-market accessories like soft boxes (diffusers) available. http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/03/lighting-101.html
Mono Lights
These more-desirable strobes are designed to be used with lighting stands and contain the flash tube and capacitor/power supply in the same lighting head. The smaller units can be battery or A/C powered. The larger units (1000 watt/seconds and up) are A/C only and have serious modeling lights. They all have built-in slaves for wireless sync. These have the advantage over the next category of being self-powered and highly portable for location work. Cost: $400 -$1K per head. These are the way to go if you have the money. There are multi unit kits available that include a lot of accessories.
Power Pack A/C Studio Strobes
These lights have awesome power are strictly for studio use. The light heads (3000 watt/seconds and up) have no power supply on board, which is instead located in large central “power pack” units that each control many lights, offering convenient power adjustments to the individual heads. This system is capable of offering a stream of continuous high-voltage to all the heads, making it possible to shoot bursts of shots with minimal recycle time. Some specialty flash heads, like the ring flash used in fashion, is only available in this configuration. A studio installation can run $50K.
Exposure and F-stops, color temperature
In a controlled lighting situation such as a photo studio your automatic exposure function of your expensive camera is of either little use, or a downright liability as it will give you a constantly changing exposure every time you re-aim the camera, even slightly. If the camera internal meter is the only meter you have, then it can be used to ballpark lighting ratios by reading your hand in various parts of the shot. Once the scene is lit to your satisfaction to eye TURN THE EXPOSURE TO MANUAL MODE. You can now determine the proper exposure using the histogram (that cool graph available on your digital SLR that shows the distribution of pixel luminance throughout the latitute of the sensor. (ref: http://www.shortcourses.com/how/histograms/histograms.htm) tempered by your judgement as to how murky or high-key you want the scene. Oh, yeah. As long as we're turning off automatic camera functions TURN OFF THE "A" for automatic white (i.e. color temperature) balance as it will vary from frame to frame depending on colors in the shot, driving you nuts. Pick the closest "white balance" choice to what you are shooting: e.g. tungsten (which is usually represented by a graphic light bulb), daylight from a window (a sun), or electric flash (a lightning bolt) and stick with it. If you are shooting RAW, you can completely tweak color temperature easily on your PC later, as desired. This is especially true if you are using mixed light (tungston and daylight), theatrical lighing with colored gels, or keying with firelight, or a CRT monitor, etc. The last thing you need it your camera to "correct" your mistake.
The main exposure consideration for shooting a portrait is where the skin falls on the histogram, . By the old book (film), a white person’s skin illuminated by the key light should be about a stop under pure white (the max line on the right side of the histogram). This is still safe, but you can make it a little hotter, as you are throwing away some of the additional latitude offered by shooting in the RAW mode, which you should be. I place the skin of a very fair caucasion reading about a half-stop under white. This gives you considerably more shadow detail in the final picture. This all assumes tha you are going for a normally lit portrait, not a music CD cover.
If you are using RAW, it’s always a good idea to shoot a Macbeth color chart at the beginning of each session for a continuous referencing when converting the files to Tif on your computer. For the gear-heads reading this, white square MacBeth chart should be around 248 and the black square should be around 36 (255 being blown-out white and zero being total black). Some raw converters (like PCraw) will actually allow you to use the Macbeth color checker you shot during the session to generate a "profile du jour" from the light you had at hand which is applied as you batch convert your RAW files to Tif on your PC. This is useful particularly in shooting under mixed flourescents and daylight, etc.)
As for aperture settings and shutter speed combinations:
If you are using hot lights, you’re going to be fighting minimums. You’ll need to crank your ISO settings as high as you dare (noise usually starts becoming objectionable above 400), to shoot at f 5.6 and 1/60 of a second, producing a good result on most of the exposures.
If you are using strobes, it’s the opposite problem. Set your ISO for the sensor’s “best” setting, (160-200) and you will probably still have more light than you need. As for aperture, you can work around f 11 which really increases your depth of field, though stopping down more than f 16 brings up other image sharpness issues so avoid that, and instead turn down the strobe’s power. As for shutter speed, your strobe power setting determines this, usually somewhere between 1/800 and 1/2000 of a second. The camera shutter is not so important but should be set to the max strobe sync speed, usually 1/60 to 1/125, thus limiting the amount of ambient light in the exposure. Note: Indoors at f-11/ and 125sec, you should be getting NO ambient light so don’t worry about having some lights on where you’re working, they are insignificant.
Focusing the lens.
The focus of a portrait should always be on the subject’s eyes. Not the nose, ears, or neck or whatever happens to line up with the nearest auto-focus dot. Lining up the ground-glass autofocus points on the eyes is very tricky to do with a telephoto auto-focus lens, even on one of those expensive cameras with the 16 programmable focus points. It is even more difficult to do on a tripod, which requires lining up a focus point, focusing, locking focus with the shutter finger, then re-framing the shot. Add to this that when working with strobes, you have very little light on the subject on the auto-focus is dependent. It is very frustrating for your lens focus motors to grind back and forth looking for the focus for up to a second while you lose the shot. Now you could add a hot light just for focusing, but that kind of defeats the purpose.
The answer is to use the manual focus. When you press the shutter, there is no auto-focus lag, it just fires. For those of us who grew up using manual focus, checking this is second nature, but for the new generation that’s never done it, it takes, maybe, ten minutes to get the feeling. Note: most top-of-the-line zoom lenses for still cameras maintain the focus point as you move through the range of the lens’ focal lengths, making it possible to zoom into max to get a critical focus, then widen back out to your desired frame. Conversely, most bottom of the line lenses don’t do this. Test your lens before counting on it. There’s another trick we’ve found works wonders, both for the subject’s energy and comfort as well as maintaining the focus distance. We use a variety of adjustable high stools with rotating seats and foot rests. This gives the subject the ability to move into the shot, and move around in gerneral adding a bit of unpredictability to the shot, that is usually desirable. And they don’t wander out of their optimum light OR focus.
Viewing the work.
With a digital camera, it is usually advantageous to go over the results on a TV monitor during and at the end of the shoot. Not only is this good politically and technically, it also provides a break for the subject and (hopefully) gets them cranked up on what you’re doing. The video outputs of most SLRs are, at this moment, still 3/4 like old-fashioned TV sets, so your 2/3 camera image is cropped which can be explained away but if you can't afford a real SONY TV monitor, it’s good to get a 14" small, boxy TV that can easily be turned on its side for portrait work so your client doesn’t have to turn his head. We like to give the client a digital “contact sheet” as a PDF file when they leave, agreeing to share their favorites and ours by e-mail. This cuts down on the number of images that have to be converted from RAW to TIF and saves tremendous time and drive space. At this point, the subject of re-touching comes into play, particularly with more mature subjects. We do a lot of this, from actors to pre-visualization for plastic surgeons, and it will have to wait for another chapter.
The artistry of your shot
We haven’t discussed the most important aspect of the shot -- it's artistry -- as there is no real formula for this. Many great photographers have come to it from other mediums- painting, illustration, sculpture. Others have pursued photography with monomaniacal devotion from a young age. My personal feeling is that it’s more about passion than anything else. All art is based on what has gone before it. The more you are drawn to a specific artistic style or movement, or even a specific artist, the more you will come up with something from yourself to add and make it your own. My wife and I have been collecting art books and ripping shots from magazines for thirty years, and not just portraits or ads with people. I love the work of illustrators (like Norman Rockwell), painters (like Caravaggio), and photographers (like Richard Avedon, who I had the pleasure of knowing) . If you find a portrait in a magazine or on line, make a copy and try to duplicate it with a friend sitting for you. Then try it again.
COMING CHAPTERS (really soon) ON PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY
Digital Portraiture Workflow
Seamless Digital Portrait Retouching
Portrait Printing on assorted media
Directing the Portrait Subject: an anecdotal approach
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