How you should not light a portrait (or should you?)

In photo school you learn to avoid pincer lighting when making a portrait. This is lighting from the left and the right, but not in the middle. The effect is that you get a dark band in the face, making it difficult to see the eyes. The person looks ugly and untrustworthy. I did that for the heck of it, just to try it out, in this photo.

You see how Freda, who usually looks real good, suddenly looks menacing, dangerous. The green eyes are a photoshop addition, obviously.

The procedure I recommend is: set up your key light to get the shadows in the right place. Where the right place is, that is an artistic decision that only you can take. After that set up your fill light (usually soft light works best) close to the lens. The strength of the fill light is again an artistic decision you have to take yourself. Finally add effect and/or background light. 

Arnold Newman was one of the greatest portrait photographers of all time. He created the famous image of composer Igor Stravinsky at the piano.

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He made a whole lot of iconic images that every photography enthusiast should know.

Now Arnold Newman got a commission to make portrait of the German industrialist Alfried Krupp. Krupp became fabulously wealthy in the Second World War by making arms for Hitler, using Jewish slave labour. Arnold Newman was a Jew. Newman describes in an interview how Krupp’s production was interrupted when the Jewish slaves would take shelter when there was an air raid. To prevent this interruption Krupp had the slaves chained to the machinery.

Obviously Newman was no friend on Krupp, but he took the commission to photograph him. He set up his lights to the side, directed Krupp where and how to pose, and Newman mishandled his film in such a way that it would give an unpleasant greenish cast to the photo. In the process Newman created one of the most famous portraits of all time.

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The zoom lens and perspective

Those working without a zoom lens have only one option to make the subject bigger in the frame: move closer. This is sometimes jokingly referred to as “human zoom”. This may be funny, the effect of the camera "human zoom" is very different from the effect of a zoom lens.

This can work for you, if you handle it well, or it can work against you if you handle it badly.

In photo 1 I deliberately distorted the face of model Peggy Mwanguku to the point that even she does not look particularly beautiful. I was about 20cm from her face. You’d rarely do this, even if you wanted to, because your subject is usually uncomfortable with a camera so close to the face. (Peggy is a good model so she can handle any camera position) It shows that the parts of the face close to the camera are exaggeratedly big. While the parts further from the camera (like the ears) are very small. In this case the nose and lips were close, they come out too big. This type of distortion does not have much practical use beyond humour.  It is called wide angle distortion, after the wide angle lens used here.

But here’s the catch: it is not the lens that causes the distortion, it is the distance between the lens and the subject.

Photo 2 shows the beauty of Peggy photographed in a regular way (about 2.5 meters away). See how the features here are realistic, and flattering. In photo 3 I made the same mistake as in photo 1 but not so badly, so we see a little distortion. Occasionally you see photos like this published. This should be avoided. Peggy looks much more beautiful in photo 2.

For a head-shot I recommend to keep to keep the camera at a distance of at least 2 meters (6 feet) from the subject. Then use the zoom to get close enough to get the composition you want. If you have no zoom, still keep the distance of 2 meters, and later in photoshop you can crop the part you need. (see photo 4). You see that a wide angle lens can give you the correct perspective, if you keep the right distance. For this you need to make sure your photo has high resolution and is very sharp: when you enlarge part of the photo, both the pixels are enlarged as well as any unsharpness. (for an explanation of pixels see my previous blog entry). If you do not have a high quality camera available, and no zoom lens of the required range, then you have no alternative but to change the concept of the photo, let go of the headshot and make a half-shot (upper body). (Be flexible in your approach, and remember that, no matter how much top class equipment one has, there are always technical limits. And some amazing photos have been made with very simple equipment).

In the previous example the wide angle distortion (not caused by the wide angle lens but by the proximity of the camera to the subject!) worked against the photo. But when used well it is a great tool. If you want to emphasize something small in the photo, placing it very close to the lens makes it bigger, and then you can include something much bigger further from the lens. 

In photo 5 I asked Peggy to make a selfie. I want to make the telephone big, so the action is emphasised. So I went in close to the telephone. To also include Peggy I needed to zoom out. You see a photo with dynamic lines caused by wide angle distortion and a big telephone in one corner; in the other corner is Peggy’s face, which is needed for the story: the subject of the selfie. If I would have zoomed in, I would have gotten only the hand with the telephone. This could be a good photo, but it does not talk about a selfie. So I did need the wide angle for this photo. 

If I take distance from my subject and zoom in a I do get photo 6 of Peggy making a selfie. It works OK, but it lacks the dynamic emphasis of photo 5, where I used the wide angle distortion to my advantage. Notice that, because of the wide angle setting photo 5 has much more of the background in the frame than photo 6.