After you've mastered your craft, your art and have the necessary skills, the next step should be: What am I trying to say? In my opinion, this is the measure of an artist and can be applied to any artistic discipline. If I'm really successful, when viewing my images, you'll feel what I wanted you to feel. At the very least, you should feel something: joy, excitement, interest, fear or even disgust. If there's no response, then I haven't accomplished what I set out to do. Even if I'm shooting for my own enjoyment, my goal is to still convey a message or a feeling; the very essence that drew me to want to take or make the image in the first place. When I do commercial photography, I'm paid to get the client's point across, again this is the sole point of taking the image. Shooting my personal work allows me to get my "message" out there and although this may sometimes seem like an egotistic pursuit, it's really the only reason to "cha
So here's another post about what I used to photograph, this one's about portraiture. I was trained in "classic" portrait photography. Studio photography was all about the main light, the fill light and the hair light. Photographers needed to know the effects of light and how to control it. Poses consisted of a full, three quarter and profile views. This was the basics, what you had to know, what you should know to do your job. You need to know the rules before can successfully break them. Note that the examples that I show here are not so static and are more relaxed examples. In my opinion, the main thing to learn about portraiture is how you deal with the subject of the photograph; successful photographers know how to get the best out of the people that they’re shooting, all in the short period of time that they have available. Initially that was my problem, when I first started shooting portraits I was never too comfortable one-on-one in what was basically a cont