Posts tagged cinematic portraits

The Art of Location Portraits: Conquering Constraints

Female Portrait
© Brian Fitzgerald

Throughout my career as a photographer, from my earliest days as a newspaper stringer to the present, one thing has always been necessary:   the capacity to create impactful, engaging portraits on location, quickly (if not sooner). 

Epic and breathtaking locations lead to epic, breathtaking portraits that incorporate background elements to tell a compelling story.   Typically, I’m faced with a problem:  how to minimize a busy background and transform it into something less distracting and more aesthetically pleasing.  It’s the ability to make cinematic, impactful portraits—often strapped for time and without the ability to see or choose the location—that has served me and my clients best year after year.

The adage goes that if you want more interesting images, shoot more interesting things or places.  That’s true. What’s also true is that being a professional photographer means delivering consistent results despite constraints imposed by less-than-interesting locations.

When there is no background, or when it’s too busy or distracting, I try to create more cinematic, shallow-focus images that pop from the background and put the focus where it belongs: on the subject. Knowing how to light creatively and on the go is key, but also so is how to use the advantages of any environment (and there are always some) to the subject’s benefit. 

 

Male College instructor
© Brian Fitzgerald

 

Male attorney
© Brian Fitzgerald

Cinematic, environmental portraits

I love creating environmental portraits.  That’s good, because I make an awful lot of these as a commercial photographer.

One challenge when doing such location portraits is that the benefit—the environment, which can offer very cool, very visually striking contextual cues—can also be a severe liability.  Imagine showing up to a shoot to find you are limited to shooting portraits inside a tiny conference room with orange walls, or in the middle of summer using an interior of a steel shipping container (both are recent examples).

So what do you do when the environment detracts from,  instead of adds to, your portraits?

I opt to shoot portraits with very shallow depth of field, in order to throw my distracting backgrounds out of focus.  Then I carefully add in lights to create depth and color as needed. Given the time of day or the situation, this may require using ND (neutral density) filters or high-speed sync to achieve this look, but it’s worth the extra effort.

The results are tack-sharp portraits that pop from the soft background, minimizing the things I don’t want while giving a sort of cinematic feel that I love.