An active portrait- photography

When I met Keith at his allotment, it was bright and sunny as forecast. However, it was also windy and quite cold. It was clear that using a tripod was not a good idea as it would take time to set up and move, which would mean getting unnecessarily cold. Furthermore, the camera might not be very steady on my medium weight tripod in the blustery conditions.

Process of shoot

I took a sequence of over 50 photos over the space of 15 minutes, initially with Keith just standing with a spade, and then in various positions as Keith dug up and cleaned the earth from various vegetables, and placed them in his wheelbarrow.

I used viewpoints so that the sun lit Keith's figure from various angles. I did not, however, take photos with the sun directly above the camera, as the low bright sunlight would have made Keith squint too much.

I mostly asked him to look at the camera when I wanted to take a photo, although I took a few with him looking at what he was doing.

Photographs

I selected three photographs from the shoot to write about.

Cleaning soil from Jerusalem artichoke

Nikon 18-200mm at 82mm: Iso 160 f8 for 1/160th second

I am looking at Keith from the side and he is looking over his shoulder towards the camera. The sun is coming from the left, flat onto Keith's face, but his eyes are looking slightly away from the sun towards me. His eyes are shaded by his hat and barely visible.

The background of the greenhouse and rooftops of the neighboring houses are brightly lit and quite prominent. Keith stands out against background reasonably well, and the background does convey the environment of a suburban allotment. I feel however that greenhouse behind Keith is rather too large and significant in the frame. It competes with Keith's figure more than I want.

A handful of leeks

Nikon 18-200mm at 55mm: Iso 160 f8 for 1/100th second

In this photo, Keith is square to the camera with the light from the left hand side. The sunlight was slightly veiled so that the shadows are not as dark as earlier. Keith has some leeks in one hand and his spade in the other forming the base of a triangle with his face. He is looking at the lens and his eyes are just in the light. He is smiling suggesting a feeling of pride and satisfaction with the leeks he has grown.

The background of allotment plots, a fence and rooftops is rather messy. However, none of the items in the background is individually prominent, and they adequately show the immediate environment. As a result, the background contributes to the image but does not compete too strongly as a visual element in the frame (compared with the greenhouse background in the previous photograph).

Hoeing

Nikon 18-200mm at 150mm: Iso 160 f8 for 1/250th second

This is one of the photographs I took when Keith was hoeing between seedlings. The narrow space around the seedlings meant that Keith needed to watch carefully what he was doing.

I prefer this image where he is focussed on what he is doing over some others where I asked him to glance at the camera. One reason is that the lighting and angle of his head reveal the strong features of his face. His concentrated expression is also be a factor in favor of this image.

Some of the photographs I took in this sequence included his hands and more of his torso, and others did not. Reviewing the sequence, it does not seem necessary to include his hands and torso. Indeed, the images including hands and more of the torso seem less effective as a portrait because the face is so much smaller in the frame.

Techniques

I have touched up these photographs in various ways in Lightroom:-

• To lighten the shadows which were very dark in these lighting conditions
• To tone down bright areas of the background
• Some cropping and dust spot removal

I also had a difficulty in managing exposure levels. I checked the first few photographs on the back of the camera and these were enormously overexposed. I took care subsequently to make sure that the metering point was on Keith's face not his jacket, which corrected the problem. I put the problem down to metering on the jacket instead of his face. Reflecting on this later, I realized that it may have been better in such high contrast conditions to set exposure manually, as the correct exposure should be relatively constant. I have now discovered that the camera had inadvertently been switched to spot metering instead of matrix metering. This accounts for the extreme exposure level when metering on Keith's jacket.

Conclusions

From this project, I would choose A Handful of Leeks as the best contextual portrait. Hoeing is not an image that I would normally have taken, but I feel that this was visually the best portrait that I took of Keith.

In this project, the execution differed significantly from my plan. With greater experience, I would probably have recognized earlier that use of a tripod was unlikely to work with a subject who was moving around.

Finally, I should remember in difficult lighting conditions to consider setting a fixed manual exposure rather than using the camera's meter.