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. Environmental portrait photography is the art of taking pictures that will be used to tell a person’s story via its connection to a certain place. This connection often reflects the message that the environmental portrait photographer wants the viewer’s eye to receive.

August Sander was a German portrait and documentary photographer who is best known for his portraits. The subjects in his photos would always be surrounded by the environmental they work in so their occupation was clear to the viewers. Sander’s goal was to consciously define people within a particular field of time with his attempt to honestly tell the truth about our age and people. Typologies, which Sander uses in his work, are collections of work that visually explore a theme or subject to draw out similarities and differences for examination.

Arnold Newman

Arnold Newman was an American photographer noted for his environmental portraits of artists and politicians. He was also known for his carefully composed abstract still life images.

Emotional Response

This photography immediately creates a villainous and threatening atmosphere, also creating an uncomfortable sense of confrontation.

Technical

The lighting of the photo seems to be bright in the background and dark in the front while the aperture is set to have everything mostly in focus. The shutter speed is highly exposed on the lights and trains while the ISO also has a high sensitivity. The white balance reveals warm and cold tones, especially warm on the subjects face while he is also covered in shadows to build contrast.

Visual

The photo is shown with dark and dull colours, especially greens and brown, while the dark tones are contrasted with light throughout the top middle. The shape is symmetrical with leading lines to emphasise this. A sense of depth is created with the background in relatively deep focus. Krupp is central with pillars either side of him while he is in the foreground staring down the barrel of the lens. The repetition of the lights leads the eye to the cluttered background.

Contextual

In history, this photo was taken after the events of second world war and Jewish concentration camps. Arnold was a Jewish photographer while Krupp, the subject, was a German Nazi war criminal. Highlighted by the Industrial background, the photograph serves as a reminder of the atrocities committed during World War II.

Conceptual

The idea that he is a sinister and cruel man is displayed as he is shown as superior with him shown in the light. His own poetic justice is shown by making him seem as evil as possible. Making Krupp lean forward to create this, shadows are cast on his face as he appears threatening at directly menacing to viewers.

Photoshoot Plan

Where?

• Garden
• Canteen
• Field
• Stairs
• Bedroom

Technical Ideas

• Typologies
• Rule of thirds
• Small aperture
• Landscape
• Adjusted ISO

Who?

• Laura
• Dad
• Sophia
• Rodrigo
• Mum

Contact Sheet

Final Pictures

Due to the intimate background, this picture feels very invasive as if we have caught the subject at a time and place he feels safe and does not want to be disturbed. This is enhanced by the subjects stare into the lens.

I chose to have the subject crouched and looking at the ground for this specific image to give the impression she is a more inferior character. She does not address the camera as she seems more aside as if she is letting the environment have a bigger focus.

Using the rule of thirds to highlight this, I have captured the sitter in a position where she appears to be in her own thoughts. Despite this, her eyes and face are still visible to the camera so we can get a sense of what’s happening in her mind.

The subject is making direct eye contact with the camera creating a sense of confrontation as if the viewer is the reason she is in the state she is in. This picture feels almost creepy as the subjects facial emotions do not correspond to the dramatic position that is clearly evident.

With the foggy background contrasting with the vibrant grass, I thought this made an effective composition with the subject central and taking up an appropriate amount of room within the photo. The photo is very naturalistic and candid as the subject appears to be caught of guard.

For my final display, I decided to edit pictures with a specific colour palette which I enhanced through adjustments of saturation and other tweaks in photoshop. Due to the fact that my experimentation led to each photograph having a significant colour, I lined them up in a grid where I then arranged them in format of the colour wheel in order to show intention and different compositions. Contrasting the bold use of colour, I settled for a black and white background in a diagonal ombre to echo the gradient of the photograph’s darker and light tones; creating the idea of a shining torch or light.

A visual element is any characteristic that can been seen in a photograph. This can include, line, shape, space, repetition, texture, colour and tone.

Jaroslav Rössler

Jaroslav Rössler is a photographer who works with paper to create interesting formal elements in his work. This is achieved by the folding and cutting of paper to create shapes. His work includes a lot of tone which I tried to build in my own paper images by photographing my designs on white and black backgrounds. I also created the visual noise seen in Rössler’s photos by turning up my cameras ISO when shooting my photographs. This helped to create grain and texture within my pictures. I believe that my photos taken on the black background were more effective due to the stronger creation of space within the photos. The negative space may have also been enhanced by a more harsh and artificial light as opposed to the natural light I used in my shoot.

My paper experiments

Gradient Overlay Experimentation Effects

Final Edits and Presentation

For my final composition, I worked with my photos on the black background due to them being more successful. This worked well as it allowed me to create a triptych display. I altered my pictures to have the sepia effect which is seen in Rössler’s work. I also adjusted the green colour balance of my images to make them more accurate to his work’s colour palette. To display my photographs, I arranged them in a purple grid as this is a harmonious colour to the sepia tone and therefore does the images more justice. This also helps to add my own flare in comparison to my very Rössler based work. As well as colour edits, I worked on creating more dramatic value by upping the contrast and exposure in photoshop. The use of leading lines helps to highlight the dark and light tones.

Guy Bourdin

Guy Bourdin was a French artist and fashion photographer known for his highly stylized and provocative images. His work focusing on unique and detailed texture is interesting due to the visual noise and desaturated effects it presents.

My texture photoshoot

For my photographs, I tried to include some aspects of Bourdin’s composition including zooming into interesting textures to where an object becomes unrecognisable. With a few of my images, I focused on creating the broken effects that is shown in his work as I believe this visual is effective. I mostly focused on photographing natural forms and street found objects in order to show a variety of colour in my contact sheet. I also cropped my images into squares to really bring attention to the formal elements within my photographs. These elements were also highlighted in my edits of my best photos. This was mainly due to the contrast and clarity adjustments that helped to show the shape within the photographs.

In this phase of experimentation, I used the polygonal lasso tool on photoshop to manipulate my images into various triangular shapes where I then contrasted them against a dark background to show negative space and further emphasise the formal elements. Furthermore, I stuck with a specific and light toned colour palette to make the image fragments harmonious with each other. The repetition of shape within the composition compliments the three photos I have worked with. The sharp lines help to create a contrasting abstract visual to the original subjects.

Final presentation

I decided to display 6 photographs in a grid as I discovered that these few worked nicely together as a collection. While editing the pictures individually, I chose to settle for a black and white effect which I pulled from the desaturated filters in Bourdin’s work. I focused on creating harsh shadows and definition on my photos in order to make the contrast and texture of the images really dramatized. For the display, I stuck with the monotone visuals and went for a plain black background. This allows for a simple and non-distractive presentation where the photos can be focused and attention is not drawn away. I chose to display pictures that created a sense of decay and wreckage due to the visual elements that are shown; this is also in reference to Bourdin.

ISO is the number that represents how sensitive your camera is to light. A lower ISO value means there is less sensitivity to light and more light needed when taking a photo. On the other hand, a higher ISO means there is more sensitivity and less light needed to take a photo.​ This can affect the visual noise of an image, meaning the graininess of a photograph. High ISO often used in low-light situations, especially when a fast shutter speed or a narrow lens aperture is essential to achieving a creative goal.

My ISO experiments

Adobe Lightroom is a photo editing and storage application available through the Adobe Creative Cloud. This program allows users to quickly and easily edit their photographs with tools to alter contrast, colour and change brightness. This can be done on mobile devices immediately after taking the picture.

I started with the creation of a catalogue which involved setting up my own station for the application.

I selected a few of my own photographs from my computer which I imported into the software.

I created a collection of these images called ‘shutter speed’ as this is what my selected photos present.

I used selection functions to categorise my photos and group them into ones I wanted to work with and those of the same colour pallet.

I then played around with the quick develop mode where I eventually made my photographs black and white.

I then moved onto exploring develop mode for working individually on my images. Here I experimented with many adjustments and interesting effects.

For some adjustments, I went for a more dramatic edit while I was more gentle for others. This was just to see the variety of edits I could make to images.

Contact sheets, which are easily made with the help of Adobe Lightroom, are pieces of paper featuring a set of thumbnail images. These are used so photographers can better compare each single image against the others.

William Klein conceived his original series when he was in the process of reviewing other photographers’ contact sheets for a film he was making. Referencing the age of film photography when photographers selected images by circling individual negatives on a contact sheet, Klein’s works invent a new kind of art that merges painting and photography.

In photography, shutter speed is the length of time that the film or digital sensor inside the camera is exposed to light when taking a photograph. The amount of light that reaches the film or image sensor is equal to the exposure time. ¹⁄₅₀₀ of a second will let half as much light in as ¹⁄₂₅₀. In addition to its effect on exposure, the shutter speed changes the way movement appears in photographs. Very short shutter speeds can be used to freeze fast moving subjects, for example at sporting events. Very long shutter speeds are used to intentionally blur a moving subject for effect.

Slow shutter speed

Medium shutter speed

Fast shutter speed

Eadweard Muybridge – fast shutter speeds

Muybridge was challenged to settle the old dispute about whether all four of a horse’s legs are off the ground at one time during a gallop. In 1872 he took a single image of a trotting horse with all hooves aloft. But his eventual solution was to capture moving objects with cameras capable of a shutter speed as brief as 1/1,000 of a second.

Hiroshi Sugimoto – slow shutter speeds

Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, which serves as a time capsule for a series of events in time. Sugimoto often uses large format cameras and long exposure times (slow shutter speeds) to capture light behaving in expected but controlled ways.

Harold Edgerton – fast shutter speeds

 In 1950, Edgerton worked with Herbert Grier and Kenneth Germeshausen to design a camera shutter device devoid of mechanical components. This allowed the exposure times for his photographs to be taken at four to ten millionths of a second.

Francesca Woodman – slow shutter speeds

Woodman uses slow shutter speed and double exposure when photographing so that she can actively feature in her own work. This also meant that she could capture different stages of movement, in a way that could trace the pattern of time. As a result, her images are blurred, which suggests motion and urgency.

The focal length of a lens is the optical distance from the point where the light meets inside the lens to the camera’s sensor.

The depth of field is the difference between the nearest and the farthest objects that are in sharp focus in an image captured with a camera.

There are two ways of focusing a camera; autofocus (AF) and manual focus (MF). Autofocus is for general use while manual focus helps with close ups and detail.

Aperture is the opening in a lens where light passes through to enter the camera. You can shrink or enlarge it’s size to change what reaches the camera sensor.

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Ralph Eugene Meatyard – Zen twigs

Meatyard’s collection of photos inspired my experiments due to the interesting use of a small depth of field. These photos had nothing in focus but the twigs and I tried to reflect this by using a very wide aperture in my photographs. I edited these photos into black and white to copy the intensity of his photos that are highlighted by the sharp focus of the plant in view.