It's Friday Afternoon. At the end of most days I select a few images I've made over the years to spend a few minutes with. And I remember that the hardest part of making portraits is the part where you get started. Where you have to make the effort to create.

 

Amy.

There are some people who have been blessed with faces that conform to cultural ideas of beauty and proportion. And there are some people who've been gifted with beautiful and alluring eyes. The work of a photographer is to learn how to put a collaboration into motion to capture these affects and then get out of the way. The biggest mistake I see from people who would like to be portrait artists is their impulse to rush. To rush through a sitting because they think they may be inconveniencing the sitter. Or because they've been misinformed by "experts" that there are lighting and camera formulas which are the secret to success and, that once they've mastered these techniques they are more or less assured of a successful outcome. 

Then there is the mistaken idea, spread everywhere, that if you can't get a great image in the first dozen or so frames you'll never be able to achieve a good photograph in a session. 

In my experience the default to formula and the press toward time efficiency are an effective way to turn what could have been a great portrait into just another literal documentation. A photograph which lacks the invitation to linger and really examine a face. By not taking the time to know the sitter and engage them in a meaningful and sincere collaboration one robs the audience of the chance to fall in love with the subject. To truly come away with an honest sense of the person in the frame. All surface and no depth.

When Amy came to the studio she was in the company of one of her best friends, Renae. Renae was my assistant at the time and we'd worked together for several years by that point. Amy was comfortable because Renae was comfortable. There was a triangle of trust. There was a shared objective of creating a picture of Amy that was both beautiful but also signaled a real rapport. 

I was working with a medium format camera that day. Shooting in the square. I shot some Polaroids and shared them with Amy. We talked. Renae headed into the office to do some work on her computer. Amy and I worked through a session and shot about ten rolls of 120 film. We both sensed what was working and what wasn't and kept moving in the right direction until we hit a high point, which we both could feel, and then we shot a final, gratuitous roll of film (just to make sure) and we were done with that sitting. 

In my mind this result (above) is an authentic and engaging photograph/portrait of a strong, calm person who was comfortable with herself. 

When I kept a darkroom in the studio just east of downtown I used to print most of the portraits I took as large black and white prints. Usually 16x20 or larger. Always on double weight papers. At one point an art director asked me to do some hand colored prints of subjects I'd shot in black and white for an ad campaign for a national bank chain. I bought a lot of sets of Marshall's Oil Paints and set about learning the ins and out of hand coloring ( use Kodak's Ektalure G surface paper -- perfect for hand painting --- sadly, no longer available). We weren't looking for expressionistic hand coloring for the bank job. Just subtle introductions of transparent paint over faces, neckties and other color friendly targets within the frames. Later, for my own projects, I started getting very loose, less constrained, with my applications of color. The image just above was shot with a 180mm Elmar-R lens on a Leicaflex SL2 

( the film camera, not the recent, digital camera) loaded with Agfapan black and white film. 

We were out in the Hill Country in the middle of August shooting for a magazine spread (New Texas Magazine) that would run the Fall. My model was sitting on a large, long, shaded back porch in the late afternoon. We'd wrapped for the day or I would have been photographing on color transparency film. When I got back to the darkroom I made a large print on black and white paper. It was okay but it didn't knock my socks off. It needed something more. So I started playing around with some of the Marshall's transparent oil paints and didn't hold back on saturation or even odd brush strokes. It's a photo I tend now to look at nearly every year at the start of Summer. A nod to the shift into hot Texas weather. 

I pulled the original print out this morning and tacked it to the wall near my desk. It's a reminder for me to play more and be serious less.

About fifteen years ago I bought some pre-stretched canvases and did a bunch of paintings of coffee cups, donuts, pastries and whatnot; even making some paintings of coffee cups in fields of wild flowers. Once I had a dozen 30x40 inch canvases I asked my favorite coffee shop if I could hang the paintings as a show in their store. The loved the idea. They loved the paintings. It was fun to sit at the coffee shop in the morning as office workers dropped by and waited in line to get their to-go coffee to drink during their commutes. I loved watching their reactions to the paintings.  

Occasionally one gets the desire to do art outside their usual lane. Make paintings. Write  poems. Write a novel. Sing. All the arts reinforce each other and trying new things progressively lowers our fear of....trying new things. 

The images just above and just below are of Fadya. I met her when my friend, Greg, cast her in an advertising campaign for a natural gas company. She was one of a half dozen talents we used in the campaign. Each model was featured solo in an ad. At the time Fadya was a university student. We've kept in touch. Years later I ran into her at a local Starbucks. We'd both swung by to grab some caffeine and were both delighted to see each other. I suggested that she drop by the studio when she had time and we'd do a few photos. 

She came over a couple of weeks later. B., Fadya and I had tea in the house and then Fadya and I walked the twenty feet over to the studio to play around with light and poses. 

I was already into using LED lights at the time and I was also deep into the micro four thirds camera format. The camera was set to the square aspect ratio and I shot in color; in raw. I converted the images to black and white in post production. And I've loved the results ever since. When shown in small sizes, like here on the web, I believe that nothing is lost to the smaller format. 

Fadya is now a very successful psychologist practicing here in Austin. I like to think that next time I run into her at a coffee shop she'll want to do another round of photographs. It's always a nice chance to catch up. We spent a couple hours chatting, photographing, changing the lighting and photographing some more. It's not fun to rush through a session. Especially if you finish and then realize that speed was NOT of the essence and that you lost out by letting that fussy part of your brain convince you that you had to hurry.

Selena. 

As long as I've known Selena she's been a musician. In the last ten years her career has taken off. Recording contracts. Bigger and bigger gigs. More famous. 

I asked Selena to work with me as a model for some of the lighting examples in one of my books. We were showing how to work in ambient light with small, portable LED fixtures. I liked the look above but I like the expression below even more. Shot during my brief Canon camera phase. 

And that's what I'm looking at now, before supper. And it's fun to remember the people who make the other half of the collaboration so comfortable.