Construction Of The Portrait – Part One

 Construction Of The Portrait – Part One

by William Lulow

Portraits are sometimes the hardest kinds of photographs to make because every human face is different. You have to take a lot into account when you start a portrait session and you have to be aware, almost on a visceral level, what constitutes a good portrait of a complete stranger when he or she walks into your studio. For example, you have to think about the person’s head shape, skin tone, facial imperfections as well as the angle of her head and how he or she tends to hold the head. All this and more has to be decided on almost immediately in terms of how you will set up your camera and arrange your lights. I will give you some examples.

If your camera position is above the head, it will begin to look bigger than the rest of the body giving a very unnatural look to the person. Conversely, if your camera is below the head, the chin and mouth will be accentuated. Also, wide angle lenses tend to distort subjects if placed too high or low. So, medium telephotos or longer telephotos are best for portraits because the amount of spatial compression of distance makes for more natural looking portraits. Also, longer telephotos help to throw backgrounds out of focus thereby providing better separation between your subject and the background, especially good for outdoor portraits. 

Now, of course, if you are looking for purposeful distortion you know how to achieve it. The guidelines above are for producing more typical and therefore salable portraits. But, there are always times when you will break the rules. All things considered, the human face is said to be “in proportion” when its three elements are all relatively the same size.

So, if any one of these three elements is accentuated, it makes for some distortion. As I mentioned, sometimes you want that distortion, sometimes not. Those are the decisions I spoke of earlier.

Here is an image where all three elements are close to the same size. The face looks “normal.”

In this image, the camera is actually below the face. This angle provides some elongation to the body and therefore is better for three-quarter type images. A lower angle is always better for fashion images because it makes the body look taller. Most fashion shots are made from about knee level.

Here is a portrait made with the camera slightly above the head. Notice a bit of exaggeration of the upper part of the head. This gives the face a more angular look. It also can be said to make the person look smarter because of the accentuation of the brain area. But, that is often times just an opinion. So, if you have a person with a round face and you want to make them look narrower, perhaps a higher camera angle would be the solution. Conversely, if you have a person who has a very narrow face, a lower camera angle will help bring that face more in proportion.

With certain faces, in order to make them look more natural, lighting also helps to do this. I will speak about this in a later article. But as portrait photographers, we need to be thinking constantly of how we want our subjects to look. Then, we can take the appropriate steps to make our images come out that way.