Can I take your picture?
A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. - Richard Avedon
I spent the week before our adventure to Scotland back at LSP studying Portrait Photography. In a way, it was sort of a combination of what I learned in Studio Lighting and Photojournalism, with a lot of new tricks up its sleeve.
This was my fourth course at LSP, meaning I have been making the journey from SW10 to Soho for over a month now, and faces that have become familiar have also become friends. It is comforting to walk through those doors and step into the lift up to the sixth floor (which is really the seventh to us from the states) and know that I will likely bump into a former instructor, ready with a hug and a smile, or a classmate, excited to see that we will be taking another course together. It is very strange that I will be starting my last day time class there tomorrow. It has been a wonderful anchor on the first part of my adventure.
So, armed with the confidence of knowing my way around as well as more than a few of my fellow photo-enthusiasts, I stepped into the class I was most looking forward to, Portrait Photography. I love taking portraits, I love showing someone the photo I just took of them (even though it is kind of a no-no to let the sitter see the back of your camera) and watching their eyes light up and the expression on their face that says "oh, wow, I don't look half bad." The problem is, most people I know (myself included!) do not like having their picture taken! Thank goodness for dogs and babies...and, apparently, sea birds (Pelicans, I'm looking at you, hams, every last one of you).
Once again, as with Studio Lighting, I had the dreaded realization that, if I was going to be practicing on my classmates, they were going to be practicing on me. Cue hair and make-up (lets just say I'd let that slip a bit during my photojournalism week, when I was also rather ill). Did I mention London was having a heat wave? I know most of the States is burning up with heat indexes in DC over 100, and it was "only" in the 90s here (I'm starting to get the hang of the celsius to fahrenheit conversion), but there is a serious lack of Air Conditioning here. Not just in my flat, where, blessedly, it stays relatively cool thanks to being a basement level and it came equipped with a large oscillating fan (which were apparently in very short supply), but many a restaurant and, even, at times, our classroom (remember folks, its on the 7th floor, heat rises...it was uncomfortable). So needless to say, the test portraits of me are not what I'd call "keepers."
My classmate and frequent assignment partner, Alice, was a different story and some of our shoots turned out quite well. Thank you Alice for being such a lovely and fun subject!
One of our assignments was to take 36 portraits of the same subject. In a row. 36. We were encouraged to approach a stranger but were perfectly welcome to use a friend or family member as our subject. While I am getting a bit bolder, I still decided to go with the friend option, knowing that I was meeting my friend Scott that evening for a pub quiz (our team of "Yanks" came in third, not too shabby considering there was more than one question about cricket...). As luck would have it, he brought along a co-worker, Ella, who was willing to let me snap-snap-snap away, technically fulfilling the assignment with both a stranger and a friend (Scott thought he was off the hook, ha!). Here's a very small sample:
It is a very good thing that I came through with some clutch answers during the quiz, because having someone constantly snapping pictures of you is incredibly annoying. But the point of this type of assignment (yes, there's a point or two) is that often if you are commissioned to take a portrait, you will not have much time with the subject, you likely won't know the subject personally (and again, not much time to build a connection or rapport), and you may not have much control over the environment. And also to illustrate (again!) that if you walk away with one great shot out of 36, you have done your job well. Thank you Ella and Scott!
Building on that, our final assignment for this course was to spend two hours with a model on Friday morning, trying to capture a number of emotions: anxiety, happiness, dreaming, in love, sadness, shattered (which means exhausted here), disappointed, surprised, furious. If you take gander at stock images and use any of these as key words, you will get a lot of lovely but somewhat cheesy photos. Our goal was to capture these images without being too obvious (ie, a really wide eyed, mouth agape with hands on either side to show "surprised"). It just so happened that my darling mom arrived on Thursday (if you missed how that happened, in the span of four days, give this post a read), and my instructor suggested that she be my model - after telling her that my mom does not particularly like having her photo taken she answered, even better!
Once my mom realized, to her slight horror, that this would be a bit more involved than me snapping nine photos of her making faces that she thought corresponded to the emotions, she settled in for a grueling morning of having her picture taken over and over and over again. I promised her I wouldn't put too many up, so here are a few of our favorites.
After a week off spent traveling around the UK with my model momma, I head back to Oxford Street tomorrow for my last full-time class, Food & Product. After that I have a couple of evening courses, but it is winding down. I've fallen back in love with photography over the last six weeks - taking photos, analyzing, enjoying them - and rarely leave my flat without my camera (friends and family: you've been warned). [Santa, if you're reading this, I've been pretty good this year, and a 5D Mark III would look lovely under the tree...!]
For any of my former Alliance colleagues who are reading the blog, I took all of these with the 50mm lens I bought using your sweet going away gift (a gift card to B&H, they know me well!).
