Portrait Inspiration

I adore this portrait of Evelyn Nesbit by Gertrude Kasebier. Like I said, I've been doing a lot of portraiture research and one of the people I came across and fell in love with was her. I recently visited UCF, the first FL college campus I had ever visited btw, and I spent a good deal of time in the library looking at portraiture books (lol I know I'm such a photo nerd...) But while I looked I found myself engrossed in one particular book called Karsh: The Art of the Portrait. pretty straightforward, but it was pretty much the answer to every question I had about portraiture (aside from the answers Frank gave me) and I wrote down a couple of other photographers mentioned that I liked, including Gertrude.

Anyways, this portrait is pretty much the epitome of what I want from my portraits. The woman is relaxed and not playing for the camera. She is letting down her public mask. She seems tired, but it is known that she is tired by her expression. You can tell she is comfortable because of her slouching position, but it is also inviting, as if she is used to using her body to invite others in. She is young, but seems experience. So much you can tell from this portrait, that is what I want from mine. Hopefully I can find a way to get this out of my models. For now, I'll just keep researching until I can get back into the studio.

Dance

This semester I started out with an elaborate plan to photograph dancers. I got the idea after taking some black and white silhouette photographs of my friend Hadley in dance-like poses for our painting class. I fully researched it, looking at different dance photographers, different lighting techniques, and poured over many, many dance photos. I found this photographer, Ed Flores, who does dance photography EXACTLY how I wanted to capture it, it was just a matter of getting people, places, and clothing... So, I had some of my dancer friends lined up, first was one of my suite-mates, and I had everything figured out, or so I thought. I did actually START the project. I got Lex in the studio, then after talking to Stephen about different spaces, I took her out of the studio... and that's kind of where it tapered off. It's not that I didn't like what I was doing, it's more that I didn't have the same fire for it that I did for the eye project. I do want to keep working on the dance thing because I didn't get anywhere close to where I wanted to be with my photos so far, but as a break I think I will be going in a different direction with the rest of the semester in terms of portraiture. I will get to that in another post, but for now, here is the development of the dance photos so far... mind you, they aren't even CLOSE to what I had envisioned originally; and hopefully they will get closer in the future if I decide to come back to it.