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Shoot atmospheric outdoor portraits
Techniques
24 October 2007 14:54
Almost everywhere you turn these days you’re bombarded with images, so use these as inspiration to kick-start your photography into areas that you wouldn’t normally try. You could try to emulate an individual image, but why limit yourself to mere imitation? A more creative approach is to use the images as a starting point and react to your subject and location to produce something new. For our inspiration we looked at lots of advertising and fashion images, many of which depicted an urban theme. Deciding on the type of image we were after was the easy part, here’s how we arrived at the final image.
We went through a range of fashion and music images to find our inspiration. It’s handy to make a scrapbook of inspirational images so you can refer back to them at a later date. Keep the same type of images together in separate sections so you can find them easily when you come to plan the shot. You can use it to show your model the sort of image you’re looking to shoot too. Which is where finding the model comes in. Unless you have the luxury of hiring professional models, why not try asking family, friends or work colleagues?
It’s far easier than asking complete strangers, and the promise of some pictures persuades many people to become models. Our model, Aaron, works in our building and we thought his strong features would suit the style we were hoping to achieve, so asked him to spare us a few hours.
The urban scene we were trying to emulate proved more difficult to find than we anticipated. The background needed to be simple, but with enough detail to give the impression of a built-up area.
We found the perfect graffiti-covered underpass eventually though, and it had the added advantage of being undercover – always handy when you’re planning an outdoor shoot. There were plenty of different backgrounds to use, from graffiti-covered walls to the concrete structure of the flyover itself. It was quiet enough for us to be able to work without too many interruptions, as you’re likely to get plenty of attention doing any portrait photography in a built-up area, but it was also not so isolated as to feel unsafe.
Shooting in the shadow of the underpass meant many of the best locations provided very little light for the model’s face. As we were using the light from the reflector as the main illumination for the face, we used a silver rather than white reflector to throw plenty of light back onto the subject. We also needed the extra light to counteract the backlight coming in from behind the subject’s right shoulder.
Adding a reflector has also provided a catchlight in the eyes. Without this the portrait would be much less effective, as it makes the eyes stand out and become the main focal point of the image.
Our original idea was to shoot most of the pictures with a wide-angle lens so as to include plenty of the background. This approach worked perfectly with the shots against the graffiti-covered wall, allowing us to make Aaron the dominant point of interest and using the strong diagonal created by the wall to great effect. When shooting underneath the bridge with the pillars as the background there was a much greater distance between Aaron and the background though. To apparently compress this distance we also shot some of the images using a 100mm lens to make the background appear much larger in the frame.
While the traditional portrait would be taken at eyelevel with your subject, that didn’t fit in with the effect we were trying to achieve. The style of picture we were after meant that we wanted Aaron to look more threatening. By shooting from a lower viewpoint you get a completely different perspective on the subject. For our main image we shot from almost ground-level, but still got Aaron to look down directly at the camera, almost dismissively. This angle also allowed us to include the strong lines of the structure as a background, rather than the busier, more distracting graffiti.
The final picture we got from the shoot was pretty close to the look we were trying to achieve. Shooting from a low viewpoint has allowed us to use the lines of the structure as a simple but effective background. Using the widest aperture available has produced limited depth-of-field, with only the model sharp, but to go a step further and achieve an effect similar to using a large-format film camera, the image needs a few simple tweaks in Photoshop.
