Portraiture photography is a type of photography aimed toward capturing the personality of a person or group of people by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses.

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Portraiture is a very old art form going back at least to ancient Egypt, where it flourished from about 5,000 years ago. Before the invention of photography, a painted, sculpted, or drawn portrait was the only way to record the appearance of someone. – But portraits have always been more than just a record. They have been used to show the power, importance, virtue, beauty, wealth, taste, learning, or other qualities of the sitter. Portraits have almost always been flattering, and painters who refused to flatter tended to find their work rejected.

A notable exception was Francisco Goya in his apparently bluntly truthful portraits of the Spanish royal family. – Getting painted portraits done used to be exclusive to families in the upper classes of society.

That all changed when photography came into existence. In 1839, Robert Cornelius shot the first successful portrait, a self-portrait using the venerable daguerreotype. Cornelius took advantage of the light outdoors to get faster exposure. Sprinting out of his father’s shop, Robert held this pose for a whole minute before rushing back and putting the lens cap back on.

However, shooting with the daguerreotype required between 3 to 15 minutes of exposure time depending on the available light — making portraiture incredibly impractical if not impossible. But that’s not to say no one dared to experiment and use “Daguerreotyping,” as it was called, as an aesthetically satisfying form of creative expression. Scottish artists David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson incorporated heavy influences of Rembrandt painting styles, particularly intentional lighting, hand placement, and posing to their photos. The portrait below shines a welcome light of liveliness and grace against the stiff and cold subjects of the first daguerreotypes.

Louis Daguerre

Daguerre experimented for years with increasing the sharpness of the lens in the camera obscura and working at discovering the reaction of various light-sensitive materials when applied to different surfaces. With Nicephore Niepce, who was engaged in similar efforts, he worked on this. 

By 1835, word got around Paris that the city’s favorite master of illusion and light had discovered a new way to enchant the eye. In January of 1839, the invention of a photographic system that would fix the image caught in the camera obscura was formally announced in the London periodical The Athenaeum.

Louis Daguerre called his invention “daguerreotype.” His method, which he disclosed to the public late in the summer of 1839, consisted of treating silver-plated copper sheets with iodine to make them sensitive to light, then exposing them in a camera and “developing” the images with warm mercury vapor. The fumes from the mercury vapor combined with the silver to produce an image. The plate was washed with a saline solution to prevent further exposure.

Daguerreotypes offered clarity and a sense of realism that no other painting had been able to capture before. By mid-1850s, millions of daguerreotypes had been made to document almost every aspect of life and death.

Henry Fox Talbot

Shortly after the invention of the daguerreotype was announced in 1839, Talbot asserted the priority of invention based on experiments he had begun in 1834. At a meeting of the Royal Institution on 25 January 1839, Talbot exhibited several paper photographs he had made.  These showed his ways of chemically stabilizing his results, making them insensitive to further exposure that direct sunlight could be used to imprint the negative image produced into the camera, onto another sheet of salted paper – creating a positive. 

The calotype was then introduced in 1841 – it used paper coated with silver oxide. The calotype process produced a translucent original negative image from which multiple positives could be made by simple contact printing. This gave it an important advantage over the daguerreotype process, which produced an opaque original positive that could be duplicated only by copying it with a camera.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron, 11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879 was a British photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous victorian men and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature. She also produced sensitive portraits of women and children.

Cameron’s portraits are partly the product of her intimacy and regard for the subject, but also intend to capture “particular qualities or essences—typically, a genius in men and beauty in women”. Mike Weaver, a scholar who wrote about Cameron’s photography in a work published in 1984, framed her idea of genius and beauty “within a specifically Christian framework, as indicative of the sublime and the sacred”.  Weaver supposes that Cameron’s myriad influences informed her concept of beauty: “the Bible, classical mythology, Shakespeare’s plays, and Tennyson’s poems were fused into a single vision of ideal beauty.”

Oliver Doran

Oliver Doran is an internationally acclaimed commercial, editorial, and portrait photographer, Oliver Marshall Doran divides his world between Jersey, London, and Dubai. With more than 15 years of experience, Oliver is often found at the crossroads of cinematic and theatrical explorations of human conditions, as he photographs some of the most recognizable faces on the planet.

With more than 15 years of experience, Oliver is often found at the crossroads of cinematic and theatrical explorations of human conditions, as he photographs some of the most recognizable faces on the planet.

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Celebrating personality and amplifying uniqueness while always striving to be real and relatable is Oliver’s calling card. Being a strong advocate of organic creativity, he has quite the reputation for his skillful use of light and mood to create striking visual breakthroughs that also strike the right chords and achieve diverse briefs and business goals.

His passion for travel, meeting new people, and appreciating cultures different from his own lights the fire beneath everything he does. His roster of experiences includes working for the royal families in Bahrain and Dubai, an honor that he cherishes. Some find working with famous people intimidating, but for Oliver, the experience has made him empathetic to the innate human spirit.

Oliver creates vibrant, cinematic images using both flash, natural light, and a mixture of both. He is comfortable in and out of the studio with complex lighting setups as well as working with ambient light in any location; day or night.

Lighting

Studio Lighting types

Chiaroscuro is a film lighting style that emphasizes shadow and light. Chiaroscuro first emerged during the Renaissance art movement – as a painting technique used to create tension between the light and dark elements in portraits and other still life. It was developped by Leornardo Davinici, Caravaggio, Vermeer, and Rembrandt. Today this technique is used both in photography but also in film and tv – it played a big role in the film genre of noir movies.

Rembrandt lighting is a studio portrait-lighting technique where a small inverted triangle of light is visible under the subject’s eye. It creates beautiful and compelling portraits with very little equipment. The origins of Rembrandt lighting came from Pioneering movie director, Cecil B DeMille is credited with the first use of the term. While shooting the 1915 film, The Warrens of Virginia, DeMille borrowed some portable spotlights from the Mason Opera House in downtown Los Angeles and “began to make shadows where shadows would appear in nature.”

When business partner Sam Goldwyn saw the film with only half an actor’s face illuminated, he feared the exhibitors would pay only half the price for the picture. After DeMille told him it was Rembrandt lighting, “Sam’s reply was jubilant with relief: for Rembrandt lighting, the exhibitors would pay double!”

Butterfly lighting is a lighting pattern used in portrait photography where the key light is placed above and pointing down on the subject’s face. This creates a dramatic shadow under the nose and chin that looks like a butterfly. In order to create butterfly lighting, position your main light above and in front of your subject. Some photographers also add reflectors under their subject’s chin to minimize the strength of the shadow. This type of lighting is named after the shadow it produces under the subjects’ noses. It vaguely looks like a butterfly – it is also sometimes called Paramount or Hollywood lighting.

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Portrait photography, or portraiture, is a type of photography aimed toward capturing the personality of a person or group of people by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses. A portrait photograph may be artistic or clinical. Frequently, portraits are commissioned for special occasions, such as weddings, school events, or commercial purposes. Portraits can serve many purposes, ranging from usage on a personal web site to display in the lobby of a business.

The relatively low cost of the daguerreotype in the middle of the 19th century and the reduced sitting time for the subject, though still much longer than now, led to a general rise in the popularity of portrait photography over painted portraiture. The style of these early works reflected the technical challenges associated with long exposure times and the painterly aesthetic of the time. Hidden mother photography, in which portrait photographs featured young children’s mothers hidden in the frame to calm them and keep them still, arose from this difficulty. Subjects were generally seated against plain backgrounds, lit with the soft light of an overhead window, and whatever else could be reflected with mirrors.

Advances in photographic technology since the daguerreotype spawned more advanced techniques, allowed photographers to capture images with shorter exposure times, and work outside a studio environment.

this image features the butterfly shadow under his nose. the image focuses on his eyes that are hidden by shadow producing a mysterious portrait.

this image is a side profile, where I edited in a lighter purply tone to create contrast from the background.

I experimented with this portrait uses a ring light coming from beneath lighting up the face. this is very hard lighting. the subject is making a strange face to create a more interesting image.

this image uses props to create an effect it has been changed to black and white because I feel it looks better.

I used the Flagging system in Adobe Lightroom to select the best portraits I took. From the flagging system I then edited the portraits in Lightroom and then Photoshop if needed.

I used a before and after view in Lightroom to portray the changes I made to the portraits to make them look more effective

Favourite Portraits taken

These portraits show a before and after image once they have been edited in Lightroom

Diamond Cameo

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On the left is an image created by me, while on the right is Henry Mullins, another photographers example of a diamond cameo. To create my Diamond cameo photo, I took 4 different portraits and loaded them into Adobe Photoshop, where I used the circle tool to paste the portraits into the circles. I then arranged them in this order to create an effective diamond cameo similar to Henry Mullins diamond cameo.

Henry Mullins set up a studio in jersey in 1848, known as the Royal Saloon, at 7 Royal Square. Initially he was in partnership with a Mr Millward, about whom very little is known. By the following year he was working alone and he continued to work out of the same studio for another 26 years. Henry Mullins called the Diamond Cameo technique Multi-Portraits, and it was used under licence by him in the 1800s in his studio in Jersey. Mullins used the Daguerrotype photography technique to create his portraits

Double/Multi Exposure

Some of the first double exposure photos emerged during the 1860s as another source of revenue for photographers. To give their business a boost, they discovered how to make a portrait subject appear twice in a frame, as if they had an identical twin. In each of the pictures, the person was striking a different pose. The double exposure technique has been used throughout the 20th and 21st century and has remained popular as a photography technique up until the modern day.

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Historic examples of the double exposure technique

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modern examples of the double exposure technique

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These are two examples of a multi exposure photo effect which were created in photoshop, to mimic the exposure technique which photographers use. To create the effect, I placed the same image on top of the other and changed the opacity to 50%, and then slightly moved the image to the right to create the effect.

Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition is an act or technique of placing two elements or photos close together or side by side. This is often done in order to compare/contrast the two, to show similarities or differences of the photos. Juxtaposition is mostly used by photographers to add more interest to the viewers into their work. Juxtapositions can be used by photographers to show the contrast or difference of certain subjects such as, Rich Vs Poor, Healthy Vs Sick, Attractive Vs Ugly and Men Vs Women.

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Rembrandt lighting –

lighting positioned to the side of the face but slightly in front so that there is a little triangle under one side of the persons eye.

The term Rembrandt lighting is relatively new. Originally, it was coined by 20th century filmmaker, Cecile B.DeMille, when he produced a film called, Warrens of Virginia. As the story goes, he borrowed some spot lights to recreate a lighting scheme that had the actors’ faces half lit. Rembrandt lighting actually precedes the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn, who it is named after.  The Italians were the first to experiment with various lighting schemes in the 1500s.  As art emerged from the Gothic period, the Renaissance artists brought perspective and lighting to painting.

Butterfly lighting

Butterfly lighting is a lighting pattern used in portrait photography where the key light is placed above and pointing down on the subject’s face. This creates a dramatic shadow under the nose and chin that looks like a butterfly. It’s also called ‘Paramount lighting,’ named for the Hollywood studio and how they lit their most glamorous and beautiful actresses.

Butterfly lighting dates back to some of the earliest glamour shots. Specifically, Marlene Dietrich, a German silent film actress, who became a Hollywood star in the 1930s, was presented on film in a way that gave this look its name.She came to California with director Josef von Sternberg, who lit her in his films with what is known today as butterfly lighting. He would position the key light above her, where a butterfly-shaped shadow would appear just below her nose. With this lighting, her cheekbones and facial structure became more prominent. It soon became a Hollywood-must for lighting.

side lighting –  Artists such as Rembrandt and Caravaggio painted using the chiaroscuro technique, which is a method that uses shadows and a single light source to create depth and drama. Still life scenes, for instance, were painted in dark rooms lit by a single window while faces in portraits were illuminated with a golden, candle-lit glow.

In both of these examples, you can identify Rembrandt lighting which is where there is a shadow on the side of the face, a standard lighting technique that is used in studio portrait photography and cinematography. It can be achieved using one light and a reflector, or two lights, and is popular because it is capable of producing images which appear both natural and compelling with a minimum of equipment.

this image has a Rembrandt light using the triangle of light under the right eye and is a full portrait cropped from above the knee.

this image has is a shadowed profile against a lighter background to create contrast. I turned down the vibrance to create a colder darker.

the use of the prop umbrella and I used another person to woft her hear to creat a windy effect.

this image is of luca i like the way the light shadows the inside of his ear and gives a silhouette to his face.

Early Pioneers

Louis Daguerre

Was a French artist photographer who invented the daguerreotype which was one of the first practical processes of photography named after Louis himself.

the daguerreotype is a direct positive process that creates a highly detailed image on a sheet of copper plated with a thin coat of silver without the use of a negative.

Henry William Fox-Talbot

Was an English scientist, inventor and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes. The Calotype was a photographic technique that involved using a sheet of paper coated in silver chloride and then exposed to the light of the camera obscura. the areas hit by light become dark in tone which creates a negative image.

Julia Margaret Cameron

A British photographer best known for taking soft-focus images close up of famous Victorian men. These images often had a dream like constructed quality to them.

20th and 21st century approaches: Rankin

Rankin is a British photographer and director who’s a cofounder of Dazed and confused magazine. He’s known for photographing models such as Kate Moss and Heidi Klum and many celebrities such as David Bowie and Madonna.

Oliver Doran

Oliver Doran is a Jersey based photographer who has travelled the world he specialises in shooting portraits and fashion photographs he has photographed many famous personnel such as Robert De Niro.

Studio Lighting exploring techniques

Rembrandt lighting is a standard lighting technique that is used in studio portrait photography and cinematography. It can be achieved using one light and a reflector, or two lights, and is popular because it is capable of producing images which appear both natural and compelling with a minimum of equipment. You can tell that an image has been taken in Rembrandt lighting as there should be a triangle under the models eye and next to the nose.

butterfly light is when the key light is placed directly in front and slightly angled down onto the model this creates a shadow under the nose and chin which looks like a butterfly.

side lighting /chiaroscuro is where half of the face is half illuminated by a side on light which creates a crisp definition due to the shadows from the subjects prominent facial features.

One-point lighting

One-point lighting creates a very natural, sometimes dramatic look that will draw people’s attention to the single lighted person or surface. It is coming from one source and can be placed anywhere around the studio or camera. One-point lighting can also create harsh shadows if the angle is right which can completely cover one half of the face if that’s what the photographer wants.

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Chiaroscuro– is an Italian term that refers to the intense contrast of light (chiar) and dark (oscuro) in art, famously used in the paintings of Rembrandt or Caravaggio to create a strong and dramatic mood. Chiaroscuro is also a good example of one-point lighting as it has harsh and intense shadowing.

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For still life or food photography, it can be used to add shadow to make an object rise off the page, or side lighting to create a painterly effect. For landscape, it can create a sense of foreboding or danger. Use broken sunlight through clouds to add a sense of mystery or brooding. And for portraiture, it can add intrigue and mystery, enhance beauty, highlight and sculpt, or even add characteristics such as untrustworthiness.

My examples of one-point lighting

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I have picked three of the portraits that show me using one-point lighting, as you can see in each photo they all have strong shadowing on one side of the face. I like that the shadowing covers the face but doesn’t completely block out all the features of the face. I also like how the dark black contrasts with the lighter background and with the highlighted sides of the faces.

Two-point lighting

Two-point lighting is when there are two sources of light that point directly towards each other and the subject is placed between the two. On plan, there is a straight line between light source 1, the subject and light source 2.

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In two-point lighting, they use a fill light so that the shadows are behind the person and not to one side of them. Fill light is responsible for exposing the details of a subject that fall in the shadows of the key light and to fill in shadows around the subject.

My examples of two-point lighting

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I have picked three of my portraits that show two-point lighting, in each of the images you can either see no shadow like the left phot or you can see a very soft and minimal shadow on one side of the background. This could have been due to the strength and brightness of the two different lights or the angle of the camera. I really like how two-point lighting highlights that whole face and shows all the features making and more captivating image.

High-key lighting

High key photography is a style of photography that uses unusually bright lighting to reduce or completely blow out dark shadows in the image. High key shots usually lack dark tones and the high key look is generally thought of as positive and upbeat. High-key lighting also reduces the lighting ratio in the scene, meaning there’s less contrast between the darker tones and the brighter areas. 

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High-key lighting is often used in commercials for food and beauty products. The brightly lit scenes often suggest an upbeat mood and positive message. This look can also imply truth and openness, making it effective for video interviews or training videos.

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Portraiture is a very old art form going back at least to ancient Egypt, where it flourished from about 5,000 years ago. Before the invention of photography, a painted, sculpted, or drawn portrait was the only way to record the appearance of someone.

Portrait photography, or portraiture, is a type of photography aimed toward capturing the personality of a person or group of people by using effective lighting, backdrops and poses.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature. She also produced sensitive portraits of women and children.

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Cameron’s work was contentious in her own time. Critics lambasted her softly focused and unrefined images and considered her illustrative photographs amateurish and hammy. However, her portraits of respected men (such as Henry Taylor, Charles Darwin and Sir John Herschel) have been consistently praised, both in her own life and in reviews of her work since. Her images have been described as “extraordinarily powerful” and “wholly original”, and she has been credited with producing the first close-ups in the history of the medium.

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Cameron’s compositions and use of light have been connected to Raphael, Rembrandt and Titian.

John Herschel, who relayed to Cameron the news of the inventions of photography by Talbot and Daguerre, was an important influence on technique and the practicalities of the medium, as indicated in a letter Cameron wrote to the astronomer, “You were my first teacher and to you, I owe all the first experience and insights.”

The most important photographer to influence Cameron’s work was David Wilkie Wynfield. Cameron’s style of close-up portraits resembling Titian may well have been learned from Wynfield since she took a lesson from him and later wrote “I consult him in correspondence whenever I am in difficulty”. The press compared their photographic work and noted the similarities in style and their consideration of the medium as fine art. She later wrote that “to my feeling about his beautiful photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success”.

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Oliver Doran

Oliver is a commercial, editorial and portrait photographer who often finds himself at a crossroads of cinematic and theatrical explorations of human conditions, as he photographs some of the most recognisable faces on the planet.

Oliver creates vibrant, cinematic images using both flash, natural light and a mixture of both. He is comfortable in and out of the studio with complex lighting setups as well as working with ambient light in any location; day or night.

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Celebrating personality and amplifying uniqueness while always striving to be real and relatable is Oliver’s calling card. Being a strong advocate of organic creativity, he has quite the reputation for his skilful use of light and mood to create striking visual breakthroughs that also strike the right chords and achieve diverse briefs and business goals.

Exploring Technique/Lighting

Natural Light: In most cases, we can make use of natural or available light but we must be aware of different kinds of natural light and learn how to exploit it thoughtfully and creatively. Natural light photography uses the sun as a light source. The available light from the sun varies with the time of day, shortly after sunrise and before sunset is known as ‘golden hour’ due to the warm light which is different from the sun at midday which is a harsh light. While using natural light we have to think about different things such as the intensity and direction of the light or if we need to use a reflector (silver or gold). There’s also the temperature of the light and if we have to change the white balance on the camera.

High key and low key lighting can also be used, high key lighting is when the photo is overexposed, low contrast, shadowless, ambient and soft, whereas low key lighting is high contrast, dark, harsh and direct.

Studio Lighting: It is essential to most photographers and helps them create natural lighting effects in many situations. There are also many different types of studio lighting with many different accessories to help photographers get the perfect shot. For example strobe and continuous lighting, strobe lighting is more commonly known as flash lighting, as the light will ‘flash’ each time the camera is fired, and then recycle its power and continuous lighting is light that’s on all the time, so it doesn’t flash.

Using Flash: Flash units offer a range of possibilities in both low and high lighting scenarios, for example, flash bouncing fill-in flash, speedlight flash, etc. A major purpose of a flash is to illuminate a dark scene. Other uses are capturing quickly moving objects or changing the quality of light. In many professional studios, they will have big flash units that are synchronized with the camera.

Why do we use studio lighting?

Studio lighting is essential to photographers, it helps them create different types of lighting and lets them move shadows to where ever they would like.

Studio Lighting

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I have chosen three of my portraits which were taken in the studio with different lighting, for example 1 and 2 point lighting. The first photo on the left and the last photo is an example on 1 point lighting and you can see this by the shadowing on their faces, where as the photo in the middle is an example of 2 point lighting which is where 2 lights were used while taking the photo.