Week 2 - Davida

Take Pictures of People

After my last blog post, Steve Metze (former instructor of mine, documentary filmmaker, and independent game publisher) suggested that I take pictures of people. I actually consider taking pictures of people to be my biggest strength in photography, but that's not to say I think I'm amazing at it. I just think that all of my best pictures are of people. This is one of the reasons I like to go and take boring pictures of trash cans sometimes--I'm trying to branch out.

But there's plenty of learning for me to do in the world of portraiture. That's what this week is about.

The model this week is Davida Dwyer, a friend of mine from college. She is an attorney working in a state office, and I asked her if she needed any professional-looking lawyery photos. She's not in private practice, so she didn't really, but she humored me and we pretended she did.

I did two sets of photos with two cameras.

I used a medium format camera (my Yashica Mat 124) to take some color photos. I tend to focus almost entirely on black and white, so I felt that I should try to get some color experience. The difference in visualization and composition can be pretty strong between color and black and white, so I wasn't really sure how this would go.

Second, I took my trusty Nikon F3HP 35mm camera and shot some black and white. I did this mostly because I am more comfortable working black and white and I wanted to cover my bases.

Cropping after the fact leads to things like the edge of a couch poking in at the corner.

Color

We shot the color photos inside the architecture library reading room in Battle Hall on the UT campus.

I do not like flash photography, primarily because I am very bad at flash photography. I think I'm going to try to tackle that in a future edition of the blog. But for now, I needed to work with natural light, so I sat Davida by a window. This not only gave me ample light for photos but also ensured that the colors would come out correctly (if you shoot most color film under fluorescent light, everything looks nasty and green).

Unlike the rectangular 35mm format, the Yashica (along with several other medium format cameras) shoots in a 6 cm x 6 cm square format. I'm not so great at using the entire frame effectively. I ended up doing a lot of cropping after the fact. In a sense, this is good--I was able to get decent 8x10 crops out of these. But it was bad as well--I threw away a lot of the information on each negative to get to something I liked.

Black and White

After we finished the color roll, we went across the street to Caffe Medici (which used to be called Metro, if you're of the same UT vintage as me). The upstairs loft there has one of my favorite big windows in town.

I really love window light for black and white, but not because I need to worry about what color the light is. I love it because I am drawn to very directional, dramatic light. It creates nice contrast between the light and the dark in a frame and gives you great shadows.

I really do feel much more comfortable with black and white, and I think these photos are stronger than the color ones. I don't think they satisfy the goal of "professional portrait" but they suggest more of a story than the color ones. I guess it's hard to shake off all that film school.

Wrap Up

I'm much more happy with the black and white photos than I am with the color. While I feel like the color photos are technically good, they don't really appeal to me in the same way that the monochromes do. Part of that is my preference for black and white and part of it is my inexperience shooting color. Color portraiture often seems to be about using the color as a key element, almost as another personality in the shot. I know of people who do it beautifully, but I think that I have a lot of work to do if I want to work with it more often.

All in all, not a bad week. Thanks to Davida Dwyer for letting me take the pictures, and thanks to Dano Johnson for reading the Onion out loud to us while we took the pictures. Dano, you're coming on all my photo shoots now.