Portrait Assignment

January 14, 2020 Mr. H 0 Comments

You will need to research how to take a good portrait. Following this period of research you will now choose a minimum of 4 of the photographs below.

Requirement 1: Indoor Traditional Portrait
Take a portrait of someone using a traditional portait lighting setup as described in lectures (a key light, a fill light, and possibly a background light and accent/rim light). Unless you have some fancy lighting gear of your own, you should take this picture during your regular section meeting where we will set up a full studio lighting kit.(Lighting will be set up in Room 121)
Requirement 2: Indoor Natural Light Portrait
Take a portrait of someone indoors using only non-electric sources of light (a fireplace, candles, the sun, etc). You might want to arrange someone near a window. Think about the light in the same way as for the studio lighting, and comment on how you created a fill light, how you created a key light, etc.
Requirement 3: Outdoor Available Light Portrait
Take a portrait of someone outdoors under available lighting only. Comment on what serves as the fill light and key light. If you like, you can also make this one a candid shot, in which the subject is not aware you're taking a photo (or at least appears to not be aware).
Requirement 4: Flash + Ambient
Take a portrait which uses a combination of your camera's flash and ambient illumination. Again, comment on what serves as the key light and what serves as the fill light. Remember, you need not point the flash right at the subject - with a small hand-held mirror or white card you can bounce any camera's flash elsewhere.
Requirement 5: Self Portrait
Take a portait where you are both the subject and the photographer (i.e. a self portrait). We suggest using a tripod or ledge to stabilize your camera, maybe in conjunction with the camera's self-timer (or a remote shutter). It's okay to use a mirror if it is used artistically, but please avoid holding the camera at arm's length; this isn't MySpace! Your head must be included in the photo. Pay careful attention to lighting and composition.
Requirement 6: Non-photorealistic Photograph
This requirement is unrelated to portraiture, but we thought it would be fun now that you are all experts at image editing. Use a single photograph or combination of photographs to create a single, non-photorealistic image in Photoshop. This requirement is wide open to your creative interpretation, but result must look substantially non-realistic in some way. As a hint: you may want to try taking photographs under multiple different lighting conditions (e.g. at different times of day & night, or flash/no flash with unusual processing); or you may try stitching together pictures of your subject from multiple viewpoints. You may find some inspiration in the artwork of cubists, or the photographic works of David Hockney and Jeremy Kidd. An HDR photo meets this requirement only if you use non-realistic, artistic tone mapping.