Adde Adesokan of Germany captures beautiful portraits of strangers by snapping three photographs of their head, hands, and feet. The frames are then arranged as triptychs that creatively reveal who the subjects are.
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Here’s a cute and funny little short by filmmaker Nick Scott about school portraits, children, life and innocence.
Evolution is a series of photographs by photographer Ted Sabarese showing people with fish they resemble.
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Photographer James Loveday has a portrait project documenting the people who use Craigslist. Over a period of several months, he placed ads on Craigslist offering free portraits to anyone who stopped by his Brooklyn studio.
Each time a person or people would come, I’d have everything set up and over the course of an hour or so I’d get their portrait taken. Some people would show up ready, knowing what to wear and what they wanted, others had a vague idea of getting famous and wanted to have pictures of themselves for their future careers as actors and models and some people were just intrigued, or bored.
Everyone who participated also filled out a questionnaire about themselves and their reasons for participating. The answers are shown alongside each of the portraits.
Shape is a series by French photographer Quentin Arnaud that consists of minimalistic portraits shot with low-key lighting. The stark lighting highlights the shape of the head but completely leaves the face void of any details, giving a creepy and ominous look to each of the photos.
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Here’s a Photoshop tutorial by Twin Cities Photography Group teaching how you can use Photoshop’s High Pass Filter to soften the skin on a portrait subject without losing the skin’s texture.
Rodney Smith of The End Starts Here has written an interesting piece on the topic of smiling, and argues that smiling is a “false sentiment” that separates a casual photograph from a portrait:
The truth is no portrait of substance has people smiling. Look at the history of painting, Rembrandt, Titian, Goya, Velasquez, Sargent, Vermeer, DaVinci, etc., the subjects gaze to the viewer is neutral at best, neither inviting nor forbidding. It is there for the viewer to see and feel.
Smiling is like much of American popular culture, superficial and misleading. It is part of our vernacular, but it should be expunged in photographs.
You can find some famous portrait paintings made throughout history here. Virtually all of them support this argument.
Smile (via A Photo Editor)
If you’ve never done studio portraits before, check out this uber-helpful video that quickly runs through five basic lighting techniques commonly used by photographers everywhere.
New York-based artist Matt Wisniewski creates digital collages by blending fashion and nature photographs together into surreal images. The images remind us of photographer Dan Mountford’s double exposure photographs, except Wisniewski uses digital manipulation rather than in-camera trickery.
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You’ve probably heard before that focal lengths between 85mm and 135mm produce the best head shots because they provide a desirable perspective in head shots, but how much of a different does the focal length actually make? Photographer Stephen Eastwood decided to find out, shooting 10 portraits of the same subject with focal lengths ranging from 19mm to 350mm.
Lens Distortion (via Orms Connect)
Image credits: Photographs by Stephen Eastwood
