Portraiture
Portraiture is probably the most popular genre of photography in the whole world. Every day millions of peoples are making selfies as well as they are also taking pictures of others to ID or newspaper. There's no doubt people are enjoying taking pictures of their or others' faces, various apps are including different filters to enhance the quality of the photo so you can look like the model by taking the homemade picture with professional app which does everything for you. However, if your target is to make a good quality picture, where you want to include a good angle, tone, mood and subject's perfect face expression showing his/her deep emotions or feelings, then portrait photography isn't as easy as it was before. One of the main advantages in this genre is that your subject is in 99% of the cases stationary which makes it easier to shoot a photo. On the other hand, I personally think that portraiture is very challenging if you want to make something which is creative, you have to find a good subject, place and be sure what is it that you want to 'lock' in the picture.
Lee Jeffries
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Lee Jaffries is a professional portrait photographer. Photos he took are truly amazing and I don't think that there's anyone out there who wouldn't stand speechless while looking at Jaffries' work. His story with photography began in 2008, at this time he was just an amateur photographer, during the London marathon he undertook, he met a homeless girl who changed his thoughts and perspective on all the homeless people. After he listened to girl's emotional story he decided to take the picture of her, after this event he became almost addicted to taking pictures of homeless people telling their life stories, he could understand them and 'lock' their emotions on the beautiful portrait pictures.
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Rehahn
Rehahn is an amazing portraiture photographer. He is famous for the number of different countries and cultures he saw. He already visited more than 35 countries and met 45 different ethnic groups in Vietnam, this definitely helped him understanding what kind of life do these people have to face, but one of the things which Rehahn has different in his work is that he is trying to find happines in these people's lifes; I've noticed that on many of his photos subjects are similing, which definitely shows different side of their hard and difficult life. One more incredible aspect of his photos are all the details of people's faces, very often he uses much brighter tone to show that the photo is about the subject.
In my opinion, Rehahn is a very positive and optimistic photographer, which can be seen in all the smiles on his pictures as well as that the photos are in different, bright colours.
Picture on the left was inspired by my own idea mixed with Rehahn's work, I wanted to separate a face from a background by completely opposite tones. Firstly I made a black and white layer, I then used a brush tool to rub out a black and white layer from background and leave covering the face. After that I was experimenting with tones, saturation and gradient tool to adjust the tones on the subject's face, by accident I changed half of my face to very dark and almost black. However, I'm satisfied with the result, face is looking mysterious and it's clearly in the centre of picture. Moreover, I tried to keep and sharpen the details on the picture, similarly to Rehahn and Lee Jeffries.
Picture on the right was made from my own, abstract idea and it was fully experimental, I've been trying different methods of the clone tool to make the effect of tree 'eating' the face, I'm happy with the result, mainly because it was my first time experimenting with abstract content in portrait photography.