An active portrait - planning

I asked my brother in law, Keith to be my subject for this project. He grows vegetables on an allotment and when I spoke to him about this, he was planning to dig up some vegetables and do a little clearing up. We arranged to meet late morning on a day forecast to be bright and dry.

Prior to this, I looked at The English Garden magazine from November 2010 to see what portrait type photographs they had, in particular the situations, poses and background.

I liked this photograph by Richard Hanson of the gardner at Houghton Hall. The pose, holding a spade shows what is happening in an uncluttered background. Other photographs in this magazine showed full length poses: one of a gardener filling a wheelbarrow with a clump of grasses, another showed Tony Buckland tamping down soil around a newly planted trees. Both of these were strongly sidelit with the subject looking at what they were doing, away from the camera.

There was no opportunity to reconnoiter the location, so I did not know what the allotment would be like as regards plants, sun and shade, backgrounds etc.

My aim was to place the camera on the tripod and use a newly purchased radio shutter release, so that I could talk to Keith whilst taking photographs. On the other hand, I recognised that I would also need to be mobile:-

• I would need viewpoints for different lighting angles (frontal, sidelit, maybe backlit?)
• Sometimes Keith would be standing up, whilst at others he would be close to the ground.
• I would also need to move around searching for a background without too many distractions.

I thought that I could take a couple of photos hand-held, and then place the camera on the tripod for a longer sequence of photos.

I planned two sequences of photos:

• Frontal light: standing and bending down, facing camera and side-facing, fully body and head and torso, looking at lens and looking at hands.
• Sidelighting: standing and bending, facing camera, fully body and head and torso, looking at lens and looking at hands.

Other notes I made were to show Keith some of the photos at each stage, and to consider using manual focus.