Portraits

Well yesterday My boss asked me to go out and take pictures of some buildings that our company did here in Sacramento so I had a pretty good time wandering around sac for half a day setting up and taking some pictures. I’m not thrilled about most of them because it slowly got more overcast thoughout the day, but I think a lot of them turned out ok.

With this new camera I created a new main category in my gallery - “Photography” - for images that I take purly for the sake of taking a picture. You’ll find the Buildings pictures in there, as well as some Portrait Photography I did today of the employees here at EDC.

I’m quite proud of these portraits. It was more fun to do than the buildings as well. To be able to just talk to the person and make them laugh while you snap the shutter trying to get that moment that is in essance a Posed Candid shot.

“Posed Candid?” you might ask? but hear me out and see if that isn’t a good way to describe it.

Portraits are about the person in front of the camera, their emotions, their nuances, them. I think the best kind of portrait is one that either embodies somebody’s personality in a still frame (like this of charlie, calm and collected) or a picture that shows them laughing. The first is obviously the hardest and I have no clue how to purposfully go about taking one, I’ve just been lucky a few times. The second is easy and is a perfect example of the “Candid Pose”. Plop somebody in front of the camera and position them (Pose), then make them forget the camera is there, have a conversation tell a joke, whatever it takes and keep your finger on the shutter, when they forget about the camera and start to laugh, take a shot (Candid).

I noticed in my little bit of exerimenting that the “Candid Pose” requires a fast shutter speed (idealy I think around 1/350 - 1/600) but obviously this can be hard to do if your lighting sucks (like mine did) so just take a whole bunch and you’ll probably get one or two crisp images out of it.

Anyway, thats my take on portraits after doing it once :-). Take a look at some of the pictures below, these are some of my favorites from the shoot.

P.S. I need a better lens for this kind of thing