Henry Mullins

Henry Mullins was a portrait photographer known best for introducing professional photography to Jersey, after moving from London in July 1848, and setting up one of the first photography studios on the island. This was known as the Royal Saloon, located at 7 Royal Square. He promoted his business to Jersey locals by pricing his portraits at “one half of that in London”, half a guinea.

Mullins’ photographs have been preserved and stored online by https://societe-jersiaise.org/photographic-archive with his collection amounting up to 9600 images. Mullins was well known for printing his portraits on carte de visite paper, which was popular due to its small size, allowing friends to trade them amongst each other.

A technique often used by Mullins were the diamond cameo portraits, in which four different portrait angles were taken and printed onto one card, in the format of a diamond.

Analysis

This sepia toned image taken by Henry Mullins displays a Mr Bolton, almost a year after Mullins set up his business. This is said to be of a very high quality for its time, due to the fact that it captures facial details such as wrinkles and shadows sharply. In addition, here Mullins has showcased a strong contrast between light and dark, with the black suit Mr Bolton is dressed in and the bright tone of his skin.

For this portrait it appears that Mullins has chosen to use a two point lighting technique, allowing for little to no shadow behind the subject or around his face. The way in which Mullins has framed this image demonstrates a half body shot of Mr Bolton sitting down, also leaving little empty space around the subject, as the background is not important for the viewer of the photograph.

Photo-Shoot

Plan

Contact Sheet

Edited Images

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For these two point lighting photographs, I started editing them by decreasing the brightness slightly, meaning the images wouldn’t be over exposed, and then increased the contrast allowing for a sharper image. I also used the dodge tool in order to make the facial highlights brighter, and to brighten the backgrounds of the photographs.

Diamond Cameos

In order to create these diamond cameo edits, I used the elliptical tool in Photoshop to cut out an oval shape from four of my best images for each person. I then copied these cut out sections and dragged them onto a blank A4 page, and arranged them into a diamond format. For my second diamond cameo edit, I also added a sepia tone over the cut out images, by using a sepia image from the internet and blended it over the top of the photos.