What is portraiture?
What Is A Portrait?
A portrait can be any human or animal form. The most common way of taking a portrait is a head and shoulder composition. Portraits always used to be paintings before photography was introduced.It is important for a portrait to show the essence of a person and something that identifies that person.
Where Are They Found?
Portraits can be found almost anywhere these days from social network sites like Facebook. They are most commonly found in houses, in frames or family photo albums. Portraits are also found in most publications these days.
Who Commissions them & why?
Usually it is the person who the portrait is of, is the person who commissions them, they will usually decide on how they want the portrait to be taken.
Companies could also commission portraits for advertisement purposes or for a newspaper article.
Alternatively a photographer may commission a portrait for his/her’s portfolio or personal work.
What Should A Portrait Include?
“A portrait does not have to inlclude a face.
‘It does if you are capturing the likeness of someone, which is the classic use of portraiture, but not necessarily if you are attempting to capture or expess the essence (whatever that is) of someone. As another person has pointed out, you do have to be able to tell from the image who that person is in some way. If you don’t, then the image becomes general to just people and it’s not a portrait anymore.”
(text above taken from :http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081101222147AAHFtmX)
At the end of this lecture we were asked to photograph someone from our course. As stated above a portrait must be of something that captures the essence or something that is associated with that person. I was photographing Kerrie who I have known for around nine years.The one thing that reminds me of Kerrie the most is her red scarf but unfortunatly she didn’t have it on her so the next thing that reminds me most of her is a bracelets that she wears most of the time.
I chose to photograph the charm in the hand because the bracelet is precious to Kerrie therefore I wanted to show her holding it, to show that its is precious to her.If I was to take the image again i would use an extra light that focuses on the charm to bring it out more as that is the focal point of the image.
