Portrait Photography How To

While in Hawaii for a month-long shoot in 2013, Colin Anderson was fortunate enough to meet a native named Pomai. Upon talking to him, Anderson discovered that his lineage dated back 27 generations, which meant his roots predated that of King Kamehameha the Great.

When I’m looking at ways to do a specific task my brain often reverts to Occam’s razor. (Occam was a logician and Franciscan friar in the 14th century.) The way I interpret it, is that if there are many ways to do something the easiest and most direct method is usually correct. It’s the KIS principle and keeping it simple works best for me. Like most people, especially those of us who are self employed, there aren’t enough hours in the day, so I’m extremely concerned about workflow and just how much time each project is going to take. If I have a task, like organizing and editing my work, that I can do one way that takes an hour and another that takes 30 minutes, I’ll take the 30 minute option every time. With all that said, I’ll explain how I handle a portrait session, from the original shoot to ordering the final images. It may or may not fit your way of doing things, but just keep my buddy Occam in mind and remember there’s more to life than sitting in front of a computer.

For those of you who have never worked in medium format, trust me, there is a difference you can see and feel. It’s no wonder that photographers such as Douglas Sonders choose a medium format camera system over a DSLR for the bulk of their work. And in Sonders’s case, his workhorse camera system is Phase One.

In this clever seven-minute video, New York-based portrait photographer Peter Hurley offers a simple trick to help you create more flattering portraits.

San Francisco, 1965. The times, they were a-changin’. If you were young, it was a time to get high, have sex, and listen to mind-blowing music that your parents might, at best, not understand and, at worst, consider obscene. If you were older (and therefore not to be trusted) it was a time to take cover; everything you believed in seemed to be under attack.

The tour bus bringing B.B. King to Indianola, Mississippi, for his Homecoming Festival concert was very late, which meant that Ron Modra would have the opportunity for performance photos, but not the portrait session he wanted.

As the revealing video below shows, portraits can be shaped by the photographer’s point of view rather than just by the subject being documented. Created by The Lab in conjunction with Canon Australia, the clip features six photographers, one portrait subject and an unexpected twist. The twist consisted of the (mis)information each photographer was initially provided regarding the person being photographed.