I’ve been helping out a local company. They wanted some portraits of their staff for their website. I spent a little time with them on three separate occasions. The idea was that I would make their portraits (good practice for me) and they would make a donation to my Rotary charity if they liked the photographs.
My mission on this occasion was to try to make my subjects look helpful and business like and of course to look their best. This is rather different from the work I have been doing for my Advanced module of the OCA photography degree which has been directed at exploring ways to ‘disarm’ the subject’s pose.
The photographs were all taken using a portable studio – a collapsible background, single light (Elinchrom Quadra) with soft-box, reflector for fill and my Canon 5D Mk 3 with 24-105 zoom. I also did a little retouching, something which I just don’t do for my documentary portraiture work.
It is interesting that I have had lots of positive feedback from my subjects when doing this work. Something which I just don’t get when I am asking my subjects to hold a pose for 45 seconds and I’m pointing a 5×4 camera right up their noses!!! Here are the portraits:
The good news is that they liked the work and so £350 will be winging its way to my Rotary Club charity account very soon.
photo-graph 
vickiuvc
January 30, 2013
Time well spent then! Result is that they are happy, you got some practise; and the bonus is the money for the charity!
Keith Greenough
January 30, 2013
Yes good result all round…
Catherine
January 30, 2013
Good for you and good for them. How do they compare with your 45 sec exposures if you convert them to b+w? In fact – might some of them agree to be subjects?
Keith Greenough
January 30, 2013
The main difference is that I worked with the sitters to try to get them to pose well….plenty of direction…chin down, straighten head, add a bit of warmth and other forms of encouragement. With these portraits I also used flash which freezes the pose. I take many shots and select the ones which work best. So the truth is that these photographs are heavily mediated.
With 45 seconds, I give very little direction. I want the subjects to concentrate on maintaining the pose. I take very few images and make do no retouching. So you can see that 45 seconds… is deliberately unmediated. The subjects haven’t generally liked the results…the photographs show too many wrinkles and imperfections. Words like ‘merciless’ and ‘not my cup of tea’ and ‘ghastly!’ have been used to describe them!! It is quite tough doing critical photographic portraiture! With hindsight I might have chosen a more forgiving format for the work…too late now.
Almost all of the above subjects were not keen to have their portrait done – most people aren’t. One of them has posed for my 45 seconds work. I’ve nearly finished the project now. I’ve one more subject, a lady Rotarian, tomorrow. I will then have 13 diptychs, which is sufficient for this project. I plan to submit 10 to Jesse.
45 seconds has proved to be very time consuming. Loading, unloading and developing the film takes about 3 hours for each subject, the photo shoot takes an hour or two and scanning and post processing another couple of hours. That’s at least six hours per subject or around 90 hours so far. Add to this the research, writing up and printing and it has involved much more than this…..the OCA talks in terms of 8 hours per week!!…I’ve been spending a lot more than this on this project!! Still it’s been great fun!!