Personality & Portraiture

Personality & Portraiture

by William Lulow

It’s an interesting phenomenon, but not uncommon. As I have said many times, each photographer’s portrait style is really indicative of his or her personality! People who are serious minded, make more serious portraits than people who are not. Many famous portrait photographers have photographed the same celebrities. Why is each portrait different? It’s because each artist approaches the same subject differently. I have often said that a portrait is just as much about the photographer as it is about the subject. So, the trick is to try to get a handle on what your specific personality traits are and try to make use of them whenever you do a portrait. My style tends to be more toward the serious. I’m interested in finding out enough about my subjects in order to make a serious and definitive portrait of them. I’m always looking for that one expression that will reveal the interaction between me and my subject.

One image I have used to demonstrate this is the following shot of my granddaughter, Haylie a couple of years ago:

If you look at her expression here, she is obviously reacting to me as her “Poppy.” The expression is in her eyes and tells it all. Here’s one I just made this year. You can still see the interaction:

I have pointed to this portrait of the late author, Ira Levin as another example of an interaction I was able to capture:

This image was for his book “The Boys From Brazil.” I knew he had written “Rosemary’s Baby” and that he had somewhat of a macabre sense of things. I also found out from his publisher, that he liked a certain kind of wine. I made sure to have a couple of bottles on hand when he came to the studio. The both of us managed to drink both of them during the shoot. I was amazed that I was able to operate the camera, because this image was made with my 4×5″ view camera! I think I was able to make around 30 exposures overall. (These days, with digital technology, I often shoot over one-hundred frames.) We had a great time and I caught a great and revealing expression, shadows and all. But, that’s what it’s all about!

I have been writing lately about the differences between “headshots” and portraits. One of the basic differences is that true portraits are more or less how the photographer sees his or her subjects. Headshots are prescribed kinds of images that basically need to show the subjects face fully lit. The trick is to make a headshot that uses a basically shadowless lighting but that also reveals something of the person’s personality as well. It is not so much an image of how the person is perceived by the photographer, but one in which the subject is shown in the best light, literally and figuratively.

Headshots are successful if they catch a great expression or one that is somehow indicative of a bit of the subject’s personality. And, normally, as portrait photographers, we don’t always have a lot of time to do this. So, the technique has got to include being able to make a quick enough impression on your subject so as to facilitate a certain “ease” right from the start. You need to be able to shoot almost as soon as the person walks in the studio door and, at the same time, be able to engage your subject in meaningful conversation to establish some sort of bond almost immediately. Every photographer does this differently, but every photographer has to do it.

This would be considered more of a portrait, the following image, more of a headshot:

Both images are from the same session, made at the same time, with almost the same lighting. One was more how I saw him, this one had a bit more of a fill-in on camera left (his right side), to lighten the shadow on the side of the face.

Here is a more typical headshot:

Note how the face is totally lit but has an ever-so-slight shadow area on the left side of the face. There are no dark shadows and the person’s face shows all details. But also note that you can still see a gleam in the subject’s eye.

So, if you can capture a person’s facial features and, at the same time, catch them with a communicative sparkle in their eyes, you know you’ve got a great image!  Good portrait and headshot photographers can achieve this by knowing their lighting, equipment, cameras, lenses and how to use each optimally. They can therefore create a series of images that can showcase their subjects various moods and expressions and from there, the successful portrait or headshot emerges.