Portrait Photography

Author: Jennifer Classin
Anyone can take a portrait photograph, regardless of experience or training due to the often overwhelming advancements in digital photography and the many tools and accessories that come today's digital cameras. Simply point and shoot, it's really that easy. Not so long ago, if someone needed a photographic portrait, there were many more time and money intensive steps that one needed to take to create one. The rapid evolution of digital technology has made those steps obsolete and made portrait photography virtually painless.
While there are many different kinds of photography, portrait photography describes the process of capturing the image of a person or group of people, while generally focusing on their face and expressions. This is a key distinction, even though many portraits include the rest of the body and background images. The focus, however, is always on the subject's face and facial expressions. There are many different kinds of portrait shots, too. A candid shot, one where the subject is not posed and often taken while they are not paying attention, is very different than a body shot which is very deliberately posed to instill a particular emotion or reaction from the photo. Portraits always have a specific point of view, and the photographer uses body language, the position of the gaze and various poses and backgrounds to bring their internal vision of the shot to life.
Portrait photography has been around nearly as long as photography itself. Even so, it was only a treat for the very rich, as it was a very expensive luxury to procure. Before photography, painters and artists spent huge amounts of time, carefully creating portraits of their affluent clients using oil paint, water colors, charcoal and even marble and other types of stone in sculptures. You might be able imagine how much time and thought went into these masterpieces. Even with the amount of time that went into completing early portraits, the artists were experts and while not easy, they produced their masterpieces in a reasonable amount of time.
As we evolved and then our technology evolved, methods of creating portraits were developed that didn't involve the time an effort original portraits took. The Camera Lucida, which was a popular trend where silhouettes were painted in miniature became popular. These were relatively quick to produce, but even so, were no match for even the earliest forms of photography. In the beginning, much like the industry competition today, there were different kinds of processes in photography. Daguerreotype, developed in France by Louis Daguerre in the early 1800's and Calotype invented in the mid 1800's in the US by William Henry Talbot are two of the most popular processes at the time.
Louis Daguerre and Sir Joseph Niepce two giants in the history of photography partnered to improve their process. The work that they accomplished made the Daguerreotype the most popular photographic process for portrait photos. The fierce competition caused wonderful evolution in the field of portrait photography. Today, portrait photography is definitely less expensive than the traditional portraiture of the past. As with many art forms, traditional portrait artists exist today, and you can still enjoy handcrafted portraits of the past even today.
Portraits themselves and not just the way they've been captured has changed over time. In the beginning, portraits captured the image of an individual, then came family or group portraits, then special occasions like weddings and events and now all manner of these things is captured using modern photography. Seen as magic in the beginning, we now know that photographic portraiture owes its magical results to science. In its infancy the lighting, background and subject had to be staged perfectly to successfully capture the perfect portrait. Today, the evolution of digital technology and photography is such that the modern day photographer can take their equipment anywhere the subject takes them.
Lighting, always an important element in all art forms, but even more so in portrait photography, has also evolved alongside the rest of technology. Standard methods for lighting portraits have been long established, making even novice photographers look like pros. The three-point lighting setup is one of them and uses three basic lighting points: key light, fill light and hair light. This particular lighting setup requires a studio to properly control all three of these particular lighting elements. The success of this particular setup is the wonderful shadows that the photographer can control as a result of the three light sources. Carefully controlled shadows are the secret to great portraits. The photographer can highlight the subjects features using these shadows. One, direct source of light would never be able to manage the depth of expression that three can.
Advancements and fierce competition among digital camera and accessories manufactures continues causing the industry to become ever more complex and paradoxically ever more simple as it evolves. With today's equipment the average photographer can change color and lighting simply by choosing different digital camera attachments. One can even take a shot as is, then change those elements and many more on their computer using digital editing software. The final image can be edited so much it may not even resemble the original subject. Isn't technology a wondrous thing?

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