| | I would like to talk about portraiture. Portraits can capture the essence of a person, it can capture what someone is feeling, it can capture where they have been , and where they are going. People in general imagine portraits portraying happy people. Let's examine the child portrait. Childern seem to have the life of luxury. They get fed, get changed, and get put to sleep. When parents take babies and children to have their portraits taken, they always want that special toy, that favorite rattle, the latest back drop, anything they can use to make that child smile. However, the life of a child is more complicated than we would like to believe. A baby has a hard time trying to walk, they have belly aches, they don't like their new formula. Toddlers are also going through attitude adjustments. Life isn't all peaches and cream. I say that to make a point that a portrait isn't always meant to be all glitter. I recently took a portrait of a friend. She wasn't in the best of places in her life. I wanted the photo to show this. She didn't just graduate, she didn't recently give birth to a brand new baby, she didn't just get engaged, so all of these "typical" smiley situations and reasons for the photograph don't apply. Someone who decided to critique the photo suggested that I make some adjustments to the photo. These adjustments would totally change the outcome. Now, in no way am I comparing this photo to The Mona Lisa, but what if someone changed that photo? Sometimes people need to be captured in the mind state, the feeling, the attitude that they are in at that time and to be just left alone. Could I have used the computer to alter the photo? Yes, but would you or I get the same feeling from it? Definately not. I think in this age of Photoshop and other image altering software, people are too quick to want to make the perfect picture out of a picture that was already perfect. If you captured what you envisioned, then that's a perfect photo to me. Airbrush this, clone that, lighten this up, darken that up, sometimes you just need to open your eyes and heart and you will get what you are searching for. |
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