Mood board

What is environmental portraiture?

An environmental portrait is a portrait executed in the subject’s usual environment, such as in their home or workplace, and typically illuminates the subject’s life and surroundings. The term is most frequently used of a genre of photography.

Great portraits of this sort will capture people’s interaction with their natural surroundings to tell strong stories that generate an emotion in the viewer, giving insight into where these people are, what they do and who they are.

Arnold Newman is often credited with being the photographer who articulated and who consistently employed the genre of environmental portraiture, in which the photographer uses a carefully framed and lit setting, and its contents, to symbolize the individual’s life and work; a well-known example being his portrait of Igor Stravinsky in which the lid of his grand piano forms a gargantuan musical note representative of the melodic structure of the composer’s work. Newman normally captured his subjects in their most familiar surroundings with representative visual elements showing their professions and personalities. A musician for instance might be photographed in their recording studio or on stage, a Senator or other politician in their office or a representative building. Using a large-format camera and tripod, he worked to record every detail of a scene.

Contact Sheet

This is my contact sheet for all of the photos I have taken for this environmental portraiture project. I have chosen the school as the main environment and found different people throughout the school in their separate spaces.

Final photos before and after editing

I chose this photo as one of my final photos because I think it really captures the canteen lady in her natural environment in which she spends most of her time in. The fact that she is laughing also gives off the sense that she is happy in this environment.

I decided to lower the brightness and higher the contrast as there was too much light and I want people to focus more on the subject of the image. I also cropped the image to get rid of any negative space or extra people in the background. I turned up the vibrancy of the image to make it really stand out.

This photo of Mr. Price shows him in his natural environment which is his own office.

All I did to this photo was bring the brightness up a little bit and bring down the contrast to make the subject stand out. I also cropped the image down to get rid of negative space and I centred his face so that it is in the top middle of the photo.

In this image I brought up the saturation and brought down the brightness. This really brought out his features and the background

I decided to crop this image to get rid of the negative space and make sure that his head in completely centred in the middle of the image.

This image of Ava captures her doing her favourite hobby. I brought the brightness and contrast down. I increased the vibrancy and only slightly lowered the exposure and gamma correction. In the background I blurred some of the things that could distract the viewers from the main aspects of the image.

To crop this image I used the rule of thirds and placed the 3rd line on her eye.

Evaluation

In my opinion, I think I captured these people’s environments pretty well, although I could’ve used some variation of environments as I did mostly just use the school environment. I could learn how to do more advanced editing to my images to make them really stand out.