Editor’s note: This post contains landscape photographs with a trace amount of artistic nudity.

Ruben Brulat is a 21 year old photographer based in Paris, France. Two of his projects, titled “Primates” and “Immaculate“, involve self-portraits taken in landscapes and in the neighborhoods of Paris.

Brulat tells us,

I’ve started 2 years ago, when I decided to buy my first camera. Instantly it became a real passion, since I never stopped. I went out all night long, trying, experimenting, I just needed to do it. It became quickly something vital for me. I couldn’t stop taking photograph. Months after months I took less but thanked more, there I started to create photographs.

I enjoy taking photographs, it’s the only place where I feel at my place, where I feel having a complete freedom. It’s certainly a way to isolate myself from Humans because they simply fascinate me. I love looking at them, every move, every details, every words they are saying. Then I consider each of those in the society, who are they, what are they doing… But quickly I consider the masses I wanna understand why people in groups/society do that, how, and why they choose this direction. In “Immaculate” my series of a business area, what shocked me is this neighborhood living just for a system and when at night this system don’t need Humans to activate it, the neighborhood dies. There is absolutely no love, no happiness, no sadness, there is just nothing. It’s places where beauties of the human beings are gone.

There is also those moments, the most intense photographs moment was certainly when I discovered the scene of the photograph I did on the road (n°5 of the series Immaculate). There was this amazing but incredible chills that couldn’t stop when I saw the scene, then I settled myself, put the timer on I run down some stairs, jump the barrier and went on the road naked to place my body with this intense adrenalin and this deep need that brought me here. When I was on the floor. I felt in peace. A deep silent peace. like if i was in a long and suspended moment of time. When it’s done, you realize and there is this intense euphoria that came in, that make you chills, again.

This melting pot of feelings was the most intense living moment I ever got.

Regarding how he accomplished these two projects,

I’m on my own, alone always, at least for those two series. I walk, waiting for the moment where I’ll chill and feel something so strong that will make me stop, I know the photograph will take place there. I settle the camera, the timer that sometimes goes up to 10 minutes. The need is here, I get naked, and I run, down some stairs, or cliffs, or in the snow. It’s cold and painful, but I don’t feel it anymore. I enjoy it. I feel this incredible euphoria mixed with adrenalin. An intense energy, comes in, I feel in peace. Feeling like suspended.

For the rest of these incredible images, check out Brulat’s website:

Ruben Brulat (via City of Skies)

Image credits: All images used with permission by Ruben Brulat

Bill Wadman is the New York-based portrait photographer behind the 365 Portraits project. You can also visit his blog and online portfolio.

PetaPixel: Could you tell me a little about yourself and what you do?

Bill Wadman: My name is Bill Wadman and I’m a portrait photographer in New York City. I shoot a fair amount of editorial portraits for magazines like TIME and BusinessWeek with some advertising thrown in for good measure. In 2007 I completed a project at 365portraits.com which got me some attention. That said, I really only picked up a camera about 5 years ago, my education is in music of all things.

PP: How did you first get into photography?

BW: I’m one of those people who gets bored fairly easily, and I can’t draw, so I figured photography was a good visual art for me to dabble in. When I was a kid, I used to play with my dad’s Canon AE-1, but he yelled at me for it most of the time, so I had to wait until I was older before I rediscovered the fun.

PP: How did you go from only picking up a camera five years ago to have your work published in TIME and BusinessWeek?

BW: So I picked up a Digital Rebel 5 years ago and started shooting more as a hobby. Then I did a couple art projects where I was shooting more and more, so when I wanted a new one at the beginning of 2007 I decided to only do photography and thus began 365 portraits. It took off and I had tens of thousands of people a day watching the progress, which was nice because then I had an audience which made me feel the need to top yesterday’s shot each time.

When I finished I started putting my work up on paid portfolio sites like photoserve and such.. and people started calling me. My first big job was for The Improper Bostonian early last year where i shot author Jhumpa Lahiri. They liked the photos and apparently so did her PR people because they had TIME call me when they needed portraits, and so I started doing work for TIME. Other people seemingly cold call me, for example I’ve got no idea how BusinessWeek got a hold of me, but I’ve ended up shooting for them once or twice a month too.

By the way, that one call from The Improper was the one time that those paid sites help me. Otherwise I think they’re a rip-off.

PP: What was your first camera?

BW: When I was really little I had one of those 110 instamatics, but I’m sure you mean my first REAL camera, which was a Pentax K1000 that I bought at Adorama for $199 used in 2000.

PP: What equipment do you use for your work now?

BW: Right now I do most of my work with a canon 5DII. 28/1.8, 35/1.4, 50/1.2, and 85/1.2 lenses. I sold all my L zooms last year in deference to primes, but kept the 24-70L just in case.

Besides the digital Canon, I’ve got a Leica M4, Hasselblad 500c/m, and a Cambo 4×5, but those are relagated to special circumstances nowadays. Film is too expensive and time consuming for me.

As far as lights go, I’ve got a couple of speedlights and a few alien bees, and a Profoto AcuteB for on-site shoots when a Speedlight just won’t do.

Most of the time though, if I have my 5D with the 28 and 50mm lenses (love that 28mm), and a diffuser/reflector, I’m happy. I like to use available light or incredibly simple light setups whenever I can. Also, people often yell at me for using wide-angle lenses for portraits, but it works for me. I like having some of their environment in there as well.

PP: What’s on your wishlist in terms of gear?

BW: I wouldn’t mind getting a nice medium format back if someone wanted to buy me a P65. I think I’ll wait until they’re full frame 6×6 though. But honestly, at this point, I’ve got or have used all the toys I wanted to try and decided that if my photographs don’t look the way I want, it’s my fault not my gear’s.

PP: How did the 365 Portraits project come about, and what was shooting the project like?

BW: 365 Portraits came about because I wanted to do a year long project that forced me to shoot all the time. As I was looking to become a full-time portrait photographer, I figured I might as well take portraits. So on January 1st, I just started, with my sister.

In the beginning is was friends and family but then a couple weeks into it I started to get volunteers. This became something of an avalanche, because by the end I was getting 6-8 people a day volunteering. This of course gave me a lot of choice in the people I wanted as time went by. I was also able to snag some people who I asked to participate. Musicians, and authors, and scientists and the like who I respected.

I would make plans with each of them via email to meet at a specific time and place. Usually it was just me and the subject and minimal or no extra lighting unless we were working on a studio shot. Mostly it was about finding an interesting setting and workable light and practicing my skills.

PP: What are some interesting things you learned through the project?

BW: Well, of course my photography skills improved a lot. Shooting that much, I’m not sure how they couldn’t have… I came upon different techniques and things as I went along, many of which are still in my mental bag of tricks. But probably the most useful thing I learned is knowing when I’ve got the shot, and being able to cull 200 photos down to that one in just a few minutes.

PP: What were the biggest challenges you faced in completing it?

BW: There were daily challenges… scheduling screw-ups, travel, sickness, etc. But mostly it was a mental thing of just getting the motivation to keep going. Very much a marathon. I spent anywhere from 4-8 hours or more each day on the pictures. It was a full time job.

PP: Is there anything you wish you had done differently?

BW: Not really. I may have started after some more of my wishlist earlier in the year as it took some time to track and wear a few of them down. And there are pictures in there that I cringe at now, but that’s all part of the process.

PP: What advice would you give an aspiring photographer who wants to get where you currently are?

BW: Turn and run in the other direction as fast as possible. Well, no that’s not fair. But I will say that even in the past few years that I’ve been active, things have changed a lot. EVERYONE is a photographer now and many magazines are going out of business and most projects pay less. So you’ve got more people fighting for less work that pays less.

Now, if that little rant didn’t discourage you, I’d say go and shoot. Shoot a lot, shoot all the time. There is no substitute for good images in your portfolio and competence at what you do. Some people would argue that you’ve got to network and blog and such (yes I know I’ve got a blog, but it’s not really about getting me work), but having the images ready to show when you meet the right people and get the big break is the right idea.

PP: Can you briefly describe your workflow?

BW: First comes the shooting. I’m not that anal about getting the exposure perfect in camera, though I probably should be. Then again, with the small dynamic range of these sensors, I don’t know that there is such a thing as perfect exposure, you’re always losing something the highlights or the shadows. In any case, I shoot RAW and if I’m within half of a stop from where I should be, I’m usually ok.

In my mind, my shoot is like raw footage for further editing, so I tend to worry more about the subject than the camera. Then when I get home I copy everything over to a raid 1 array. A folder for each shoot inside a folder for each subject, just to keep it straight. Then I import them from the disk into lightroom, convert to DNG, rename and sort.

I go through a multiple-step process. The ones worth anything get 1 star, then I go through those and the best get two stars, then I go through those until I end up with the 5 or 6 I want to retouch. WB and exposure and fill light etc are done in lightroom, then I export a 16bit PSD into Photoshop and add lots of masked curves to make the image look like something. When I’m done I backup the project to an external drive and export a full-res jpg which I upload to jungle disk as a last ditch backup in case my house gets fire bombed in an election fraud riot.

PP: How do you go about doing portraiture?

BW: Usually what goes through my mind is, “How the hell am I going to pull THIS one off?” by which I mean, I look at the setting and the light and the subject and I try to think of ways they could intersect well. That said, I’m very much the kind of photographer who will start shooting and ask questions later. I’d rather naturally flow into something good instead of standing back and piecing it together in my mind for 15 minutes before I pick up my camera. I’m much more worried about the subject. This might be indicative of some deep psychological problem I undoubtedly have, but I’m always concerned with keeping the subjects attention and chatting with them. Hopefully it gets to the point where they open up and forget that they’re getting their picture taken. Usually that’s when the good stuff happens.

I shoot anywhere from 2 to 500 pictures in a sitting. On average though I can get what I need in 125 or so, that’s usually where the numbers come out. I had two shoots the other day though that couldn’t have been more different. First shoot I shot 450 images and got about 2 pics I was at all happy with. That night I did a studio shoot where I ended up with 200 images, 40 of which were better than the best of the afternoon shoot. There are a lot of variables.

The difficult thing is knowing what you’re looking for, and for me it’s an emotional thing more than anything. I’ll take a picture and I’ll chimp it on the screen and I’ll get all giddy and say “yes, yes, yes, yes, yes” like I’ve just cracked the vault in a bank heist. It’s a combination of things, but my ideal portrait is one where the the subject looks right and that can be anywhere from vulnerable to invulnerable depending on my goals. I’m also looking for good light, something I can work with later in post production. But then there’s that pictorial quality that’s hard to put your finger on with words. I want my pictures to look like paintings if I can. Like something more than just a snapshot.

The scariest moments are where none of this is clicking and you’ve tried the experimental stuff which didn’t pan out, and so you go back to your bag of tricks and setups you’ve used the the past and THAT doesn’t work.. that’s where I panic. You can’t guarantee that you’re going to get good pictures out of a shoot. Sometimes it just doesn’t happen. I shot Physicist Brian Greene a couple years ago and said that it must be like working on a theory for 3 hours at the blackboard and in the end coming up with 1=2. Game over, try again. But that’s ok, it happens to everybody. You go but an Annie Leibovitz book and there are 50 pictures in there from 20 years of shooting. You don’t think there were a ton of shoots that she’d rather forget about? Imagine if you could take only the best 3-4 images per year. I’m guessing yours would look pretty good too. Don’t forget that or get discouraged.

PP: Is there anything you wish you had known when you first started out on your photographic journey?

BW: Hmm… I’m having a hard time with this one… There are things that I knew would be tough, but I went anyway. Everything in life is messy, so it’s no surprise. Looking back at earlier photos of mine, I wish I had done things differently, but then that’s always the case.

PP: Can you remember any specific things you learned that caused the largest leaps in the quality of your photography?

BW: I think the biggest leaps in my work have come in post-production. I can remember the day I started playing with curves to really bring out the contrast in different areas of my images and make them into something more than they were in camera. I like my images best when they look like paintings, and this is a big ingredient in that.

PP: Would you advise a new photographer to start out in film or digital? Why?

BW: Definitely digital. For a number of reasons. The main reason is the instant feedback. You can shoot and see what you’ve done. That plus the fact that you can shoot as much as you like without it costing you money are huge advantages. On top of all that, digital keeps getting better while film has peaked. I wouldn’t bet that you’ll even be able to get film in 5 years. Maybe there will be botique companies selling b/w 35mm film for rich guys who own an antique Leica, but that’s about it.

PP: Say a friend comes to you asking for advice on how to improve their portraiture. What are some things you would tell him?

BW: I think that a lot of people lately spend too much time on really fancy lighting setups so that their pictures look like comic books. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very cool look and makes for very some interesting pictures, hell I’ve experimented with it myself, but I don’t think it makes for true portraits most of the time.

For me, the trick to portraits is to engage the subject and get them involved. You can’t take a good portrait unless someone lets you. You can’t ’steal’ it without their permission. So you’ve got to get through to them and make them comfortable enough to let you in. So, I guess my advice is to talk to your subject and get the technical stuff down so that you’re not thinking lighting ratios and f/stops while you’re shooting.

PP: Who are some photographers whose work you follow online?

BW: This changes constantly. Lately Eric Ogden, Brigitte Lacombe, Stephane Lavoue, Joey Lawrence, Chase Jarvis, and Dan Winters are making me ill. And that’s the highest form of compliment from me. It means that I feel like I’ll never do stuff as cool as them.

PP: If you could see one person interviewed by PetaPixel, who would you choose?

BW: I’d love to hear from Stephane Lavoue, is use of light just kills me. His images look like paintings and it would be great to figure out how he does it.

PP: Any final thoughts you would like to share with PetaPixel readers?

BW: Just that there’s no substitute for shooting and shooting and more shooting. Push yourself and good things will come.

Here’s an unprocessed portrait I took a couple days ago.

Canon 40D + 16-35mm f/2.8 at 21mm. f/5.6, 1/125s and ISO 1600

I’m going to show you how I would go about post-processing this particular portrait of a child.

First, a little about the shot: it was taken at ISO 1600. Big mistake. I was constantly moving between indoors and outdoors, so dropping the ISO slipped my mind. If I had gone down to something like 800 or 400, I could have reduced a lot of noise and obtained stronger colors.

I was also being lazy and shooting in Program mode. If I had shot it wide open at f/2.8, the background could have been thrown out of focus more.

The sun was somewhere overhead behind the child, and there was a wall directly behind me, which was bouncing a good amount of light into his eyes. Eyes that lack any sparkle often appear dull, two-dimensional, and lifeless.

Anyhow, the portrait was very candid and wasn’t set up at all. Now, onto post-processing:

First, I open up the photograph in Adobe Camera Raw, and make the following adjustments:

White Balance: Upped the temperature from 4200 to 4700 to bring a little warmth back into the shot. The As Shot looked too cool.
Exposure: +50 to expose the shot a little more. If the background was completely blown out, I would have left this untouched to avoid too much clipping back there.
Recovery: +50 to recover many of the clipped areas in the background and a few areas in the foreground. (tip: toggle clipping indication with the U and O keys).
Fill Light: +10. This adds a little more “light” to the shadow areas of the shot, but also reduces contrast, since it turned many of the darkest areas into gray.
Blacks: +15 to set the darkest of the gray areas into true black, recovering a good amount of the black we lost through the Fill Light slider.
Brightness: Left unchanged.
Contrast: Upped this to +50 to make the photograph more contrasty. The original was pretty flat.
Clarity: +30. For photos with slightly blown out backgrounds like this one, I like to increase clarity a little to add a little more contrast to areas like the tree leaves.
Vibrance: Left untouched. After the previous steps, the photograph seemed saturated enough.

Also sharpened the photo a little and added some vignetting (about -50 for amount with midpoint at 25).

This is the resulting JPEG that Adobe Camera Raw spit out after making the above modifications (hover over it to compare it to the unprocessed version):

Finally, I give the kid’s eyes a little boost in brightness. There’s lots of ways to go about doing this, but usually I like to use the masked curves adjustment layer technique I learned from David over at chromasia.

Here’s the resulting photo after I boost the eyes (hover over it to see what the eyes boost did):

Pretty subtle, but a little extra glow in the eyes does help a lot. Hover over this link to see the mask that I used to apply a curve only to the eyes. You can also hover over this link to compare the final photograph with the original, unprocessed photo.

My college friends and I used to enjoy taking group portraits in and around the Berkeley campus.

Here’s one such photograph we took in front of Sproul Hall, where many of the iconic photographs of Vietnam protests were taken:

Taken with a Canon 40D + 10-22mm at f/3.5, 1/4s, and ISO 1600.

While I like how this photograph turned out, I’ve discovered that I much prefer group photos in which each person is positioned in a unique location, at a unique depth, with a unique pose.

For example, here’s another photograph we took a year earlier in the courtyard of one of the dormitories:

Taken with a Canon 20D + 24-70mm at f/3.2, 1/13s, and ISO 3200.

Notice how I tried to keep everyone distinct in the following elements:

• Distance
• Pose
• Direction

Also, try to space out the people in the frame in a not-so-uniform way. I tried to keep each person in their own little area of the frame, at a different head level than the others. In my opinion, uniformity tends to make for boring group photos, while adding some fake randomness makes things a lot more interesting.

Here’s another photo we took the night of the first photo:

I like this photo better than the first one, but not as much as the second one. I think it’s much more interesting and dynamic, but the lighting wasn’t done very well (we were just poor college students with a single mounted strobe). Also, unlike the first photograph, there’s too much overlap in bodies and too many heads next to each other on the same level.

Anyhow, next time you take a group photo, try to focus on making the distance, pose, and direction of each person unique and see if that spices up your portrait!

A few weeks ago, I was taking photographs of my friend Tommy at his Berkeley graduation using a Canon 40D and the 24mm f/2.8. I had originally purchased the 24mm as part of a package and was planning on selling it off, but decided to keep it after being shocked by its quality and versatility. Anyhow, here’s an unprocessed photograph of my friends Tommy and Jacob I took right after the graduation:

It was a pretty cloudy day, which was definitely a plus in terms of lighting. I shot the photo wide open at f/2.8, which blurred the background enough to bring out the subjects, but not too much in order to keep the campanile recognizable. In terms of framing, I positioned myself so that

1. The subjects obey the rule of thirds.
2. The campanile is framed by the Hass School of Business gate.

Finally, in terms of timing, I waiting until the balloons floated to a visible position above the subjects, since the slight wind was blowing them around.

Now, opening the image in Adobe Camera Raw, I made the following post-processing decisions:

White Balance: Increased temperature from 4950 to 5450 (you can hold shift and press the right arrow key) to bring some warmth back into the scene, since it’s pretty cool. Left the tint unchanged at -2. Hover over the image to compare:

Exposure: Left unchanged, since the photo was exposed pretty well.

Recovery, Fill Light, and Blacks: Now, pressing ‘U’ and ‘O’ to turn on shadow and highlight clipping warning (respectively), we see the following:

Camera Raw (You can do these things in Lightroom and Aperture too, of course) overlays the image in certain places with blue and red pixels to indicate where shadows and highlights are clipped (where information is lost). The three values we use to try and recover as much of this lost information as we can are “recovery”, “fill light”, and “blacks”. Holding Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) while dragging recovery or blacks will temporarily replace the actual image with a black background, allowing you to see the clipped pixels more clearly.

First, we slide recovery over to 16. I notice that after 16, there isn’t much more detail being recovered no matter how much more I increase the value. Setting recovery to too high of a value results in a muddy looking photograph.

To recover shadow details, we add a little fill light by setting it to 10. This removes most of the black clipping pixels. We can then recover most of the rest by dropping the blacks value down a few points to 2.

What results is an image with more detail, but less contrast. Hover over it to compare:

Notice how the dark shadows became a little lighter, the sky became a little more blue, and the overall difference between dark and light areas became less pronounced.

Contrast, Clarity, Vibrance, Sharpness, and Vignetting: To get back the contrast we lost in the process of recovering detail, I move the contrast slider over to the right until it looks right. In this case, I set it at 80. The clarity value can make things like the campanile and edges of the building more defined. I slide it up to 25. Vibrance I increase by 15 to make things a little more colorful. Finally, I sharpen the photo a little and add some lens vignetting to make the subjects stand out more.

Here is the final photograph. Hover over it to compare it to the original, unprocessed version:

If you have questions, suggestions, or other remarks, please leave a comment! I’d love to hear from you.

If you want a reflector to play with lighting, but don’t want to shell out money for a real one, you might want to try making an aluminum foil reflector. They’re cheap, easy to make, and decent at providing fill light for harsh shadows.

How to Make It

What you’ll need:

• A large, flat board (i.e. cardboard box, display board/foamcore)
• Adhesive (i.e. tape or spray-on adhesive)
• Aluminum foil

The process of actually making the reflector is very intuitive. Simply modify your board to the size and shape you want, and attach aluminum foil to the surface. One thing to note is that aluminum foil usually has two different surfaces:

One is more reflective than the other, so it’s up to you to choose which you’d like to use. Instead of choosing, I covered both sides of my cardboard with aluminum foil, with a different surface on each side. This allows me to choose how much light I’d like to reflect.

Also, some people choose to crumple up their aluminum foil before attaching it to the board, since this provides a softer and less directional light. You can also spray paint the foil to change the color and quality of the light you reflect.

Here is how my personal reflector turned out:

I chose to use a cardboard box since it was cheaper than a foamcore and could be folded up and tucked away, while having enough surface area to provide a significant amount of light.

How to Use It

These reflectors can help you add fill-light to an outdoor shot where harsh lighting would otherwise cast unflattering shadows on your subject. Take the following “portrait” for example:

You can use the reflector in this situation to fill in the shadows:

Here’s the portrait that results. Hover your mouse over it to compare it to the original:

As you can see, the reflector can help you overcome undesirable lighting conditions and can add a glint to your subject’s eyes that brings any portrait to life.

People often use a shallow depth of field in portraiture to separate a subject from the distracting background, allowing the face (more specifically, the eyes) to be in sharp focus while the background is blurred. Instead of doing this, sometimes I enjoy focusing on something closer towards me, putting the subject’s face out of focus instead and drawing the viewers attention to something else. Here are some examples:

Even if what you choose to focus on does not have any meaning or significance, it can still make the photograph much more interesting than if everything were in focus.

Here I blurred the face enough to bring attention to what I want the viewer to focus on, but not so much that the viewer cannot tell who the subject is or what the facial expressions are.

Combine the shallow depth of field with interesting angles and creative framing to spice up the portrait even more.

Using a shallow depth of field can help you communicate something about a person in a unique way. My friend Joseph often fell asleep on the floor of my room during long undergraduate nights. Here I chose to focus on his hand while telling the story in the blurred background.

Here I tried to make the photograph more interesting by combining a shallow depth of field, a unique angle, and a wide-angle lens.

How to Take This Type of Photograph

The main technique for taking this kind of photograph is to focus on something and then recompose the photograph before taking the picture. The two main factors that will affect how blurred the background are relative distance and the aperture.

For relative distance, the closer you move in toward what you’re focused on, the more blurred the things in the background (i.e. the face) will be. Thus, you might need to get in very close to the point you’re focusing on in order to throw the subject’s face out of focus, and doing this might require a wide angle lens.

Also, the larger your aperture is (lower f-number) the more blurred the background will become, so to achieve maximum blur you should use the lowest f-number your lens allows.

If you have any other suggestions, tips, or examples regarding this technique, leave a comment and share!