Tagged with aesthetics - Personal View Talks http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussions/tagged/aesthetics/feed.rss Thu, 02 May 24 15:13:25 +0000 Tagged with aesthetics - Personal View Talks en-CA Portrait Photographs: a time and space http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/9489/portrait-photographs-a-time-and-space Wed, 29 Jan 2014 16:58:48 +0000 rNeil 9489@/talks/discussions Vitaliy has suggested perhaps a new discussion here in "skills" about portrait/people photography and the problems, ideas, and solutions that one finds. And as @maxotics noted in a recent post, it is so easy to shoot many images with a camera like a D600, in fact faster than we really can think about them. Most modern cameras are so quick and easy to make images with we all tend to shoot too much and think too little. My wife and I are as guilty of that at times as anyone. And we are both long-time professional portrait photographers: it's our only house-hold income. We've long known better but still ... these durn modern cameras!

Many images we as photographers take are just to create a very nice image. We're not thinking at the time we're using the camera about how that image will be treated in post-processing, then sized, framed/matted and placed in a particular space in a particular home with the planned intent to affect the emotions of the people living in that space. But if you stop to think about the aesthetics and emotional "content" of our living spaces, it can be very worthwhile to think ahead and create something ... satisfying. Worth viewing and worth living "around".

We have sought training and experience to do things differently: we work with our clients to plan out an image that will go in a specific place, and will have a specific emotional feel and bring that feel to that space. This is a process where size matters; composition matters; distance of viewers near/far matters; color schema matters; family inter-personal dynamics matters; space available matters. It's a much more complicated way to approach photographing your subjects. It's very much like trying to get all the emotional information from a movie scene into one still image placed in one space.

And when done really well, clients often shed tears when the image/s first go up into place. It can have that much effect on the feel of the room.

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