Week 4 - Emulating Eakins, Foiled by a Lamp

Lessons from Portraiture

Miss Amelia Van Buren
Thomas Eakins, 1891 - image from Wikipedia

This is a painting by Thomas Eakins, an American painter whose work I only recently discovered. Given how important and influential he was, I imagine that I'd have learned about him had I paid better attention to art history while I was in school. As such, I was too busy making movies where puppets embezzle money and commit murders to cover it up (said movie is not nearly as good as it sounds).

I came upon Eakins when I was looking for inspiration for portraiture. When you are a writer, especially before you have discovered your own style, you are supposed to find a writer you like and shamelessly copy him/her until your own voice emerges. I thought that I would do well to think along the same lines.

I find myself interested in very expressive, moody use of light. In film school, I had a cinematography teacher tell me that studying paintings was a great way to get a feel for artistic use of light; now, here I am, ten years later, listening to her.

Anyway, I decided that I would sit down with Rachel and try to get a very deliberate portrait, inspired by Eakins (and especially the painting of Miss Van Buren). I'm sure it would take a lifetime of study to fully appreciate everything a master painter does, but I observed a few things from his style that I could immediately emulate.

First, subjects almost never look toward the viewer. This gives the portrait more of a "narrative" feel--what are they looking at? What are they thinking about? If they look at you, they are engaging directly with you, but if they're focused on something else, they're enigmatic.

Second, light is strongly motivated from one side, and shadows are important.

I generally try to do these things already, but not in as deliberate or careful of a way. So I got my medium-format camera, moved a bunch of stuff in the living room around, and put Rachel on the couch.

That Damn Lamp

HAI I'M A LAMP LOL

I had a very deliberate scene in mind. I shot an entire roll of film, all with the same camera position, lighting, and settings, and had Rachel vary her pose in every one. This is the negative I decided to use.

While shooting, I thought I had everything lined up beautifully. However, after developing and seeing the photos on the proof sheet, I immediately realized two errors.

The first is relatively minor. There's an ugly seam on our wall behind the couch that I thought would be in shadow. I should have read the light back there; if I'd known you could see it I'd have reframed the shot.

The second problem, though, is kind of a big deal to me. It has to do with that lamp.

I thought the lamp would look cool; it would be obvious where the light was coming from and it would contrast with the relatively darker area of the subject. Having seen the photo, though, I completely disagree. It takes up almost a quarter of the frame!

Here I have this somewhat interesting scene, and there's a giant glowing eye magnet taking up the top right of the frame, saying "hey look at me, even when you're looking at the woman on the couch you're trying to keep looking back up at me. I'm the brightest thing in the shot!"

That's better.

I was able to save the photo with a relatively heavy crop, which I was able to do because I shot the thing on medium-format film. It still irks me, though, because it's another instance of me throwing away a huge chunk of my negative to get the photo I want.

This crop is basically what I was trying to do from the start, and I'm kicking myself a little that I didn't just do it in-camera. This is the process that Ansel Adams calls "visualization:" you don't just shoot and hope that something turns out, fixing it later by cropping. You imagine exactly what you want the final picture to look like, and then you manipulate the camera and film to get that image. That's what I'm striving for.

That being said, I got what I think is a very nice photo out of it, so it's not all bad. I'm just going to chalk this one up to experience and try again next week.

Bonus!

The day after I took the photo above, I took this one on 35mm. I don't have an instructive story to tell about this photo, but I like it. So I'm sharing it.



Thanks for stopping by. Drop me a comment if you like. I should have a new post next week, hopefully.