Assignment, Week 5: Portraits

Theme: Inner Child

This week we our special guest speaker, Salgu Wissmath, gave a presentation on portraits. Portaits is one of the most common areas of photography - the expressions and personalities of human subjects are unique and dynamic in ways that a static landscape or helmeted athlete can never really be. But most of all, people like people, and over the course of your experience with photography, chances are you'll end up with lots of photos of friends and family, among others.

There are a few important things to keep in mind when taking portraits:

Composition - pay attention (and experiment with) angles of view and perspective. Do you want to be zoomed out and really up-close to your subject? Or far way and zoomed in? Do you want to get up on a chair or table and shoot down? Or crouch onto the floor and shoot upwards.
Background - typically, you want a solid, clean background that won't distract much from your actual subject, although blank beige walls tend to be somewhat boring.
Direct your subject - most people aren't professional models, and you can't simply sit them in front of the camera and expect them to know what to do. Talk to your subject, make them feel comfortable, and direct - angle your head this way, put your hands there, etc.
Lighting - Pay attention to where the light is coming from: how strong is it, what direction is it coming from, and how do you want to position your subject relative to it?

For this assignment you'll be doing a portrait session with another student in the class. Get together, find a time to meet up over the week, and see what you can come up with. Assignment Summary:

Find another student, and get together to do a portrait session. If you want to get together in groups of more than 2, that's fine.
If you need help finding a partner, post here: http://www.photodecal.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=132
Upload photos here: http://photodecal.org/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=7399
The theme for the week is "Inner Child".