Samora

Another portrait of Samora.

It's All In The Eyes

One of the biggest things for me when shooting portraits is the eyes. I learnt while working in video and cinema that selling a shot involves a lot of things, but if the eyes don't convince you, then everything can fall apart. When shooting portraits, this is something I really look for. You don't get the luxury of 24+ frames per second to tell a story. You only get one.

I am still learning how this works, and dare say that it's something that I'll never stop learning.

Above is a shot of Erin, my talented friend that has helped me so much to learn this in the shoots we have done together.

A Portrait of Matthew

Matthew is a man of many talents. He runs Nanna's Coffee & Vintage, is a musician with many credits, has an amazing beard and fire-twirls.

We had a bit of fun capturing Matt down at the skate park last night. Above is one of the less flame dynamic portraits we shot but does show Matt's intense focus.

Han Grenade

Skater: Han Grenade

Series: Faces of Derby

BEFORE & AFTER - EDITING MENTALITY

Because these portraits where shot at a training camp, most of the skaters where sweaty and flushed from the exercises they had been doing. This is a calculated risk to photograph people like this because they are potentially not going to look the greatest and when using sharp lenses and good lights, all the flaws are going to come out.

My intention of these portraits isn't to make the images as slick as say a fashion or beauty portrait, but to show the skaters as they really are. To me, the blemishes in this style of portrait is actually distracting. I could easily just turn the images to black and white and a lot of the issues would be resolved, but I wanted colour. So my editing philosophy for these portraits is fairly simple. Take out anything that has been added in from exertion, mainly on a skin level. Keep most of the flaws that each skater has normally has (ie. leave permanent marks, etc). Fix any hair or clothes that I find really distracting and overall make a clean profile that doesn't completely show how sweaty and exhausted the skater actually is.

With permission from Han, I have created a basic animated GIF of the above picture edit. Note, GIF only have 256 colours, therefore don't look for detail but watch at the transition.

Beginning to End - A basic example of a portrait edit.

A Portrait of Jayse

Jayse is friend that came around later in life. We met through mutual friends and always hit it off. We have lots of things in common. Taste in music, horror films and sometime alcoholic beverages.

A few years ago I fee-loaded on Jayse's couch which working on a feature film in Hobart. Conversation on those nights brought up the fact that both our birthdays where coming up. That they where on the same day. Then after a bit more third party answers (our mums), we also found out that we where both born in the same hospital only an hour apart. I am glad to say that I am Jayse's senior and me must respect me for that (ongoing joke).

On Saturday I visited Jayse as it been quite a while between catchup and totted along the camera. We caught up about life, the universe and everything but also Morristien Productions. The thing about Jayse is he is a extremely talented writer, but until recently, life had taken inspiration from him for years (some jobs can do that to you). Now he is back on the writing horse. The acting steed also came back as well, and they are galloping to something amazing (never allow me to write that dribble again please).

So the following are some more candid and posed shots from Jayse's house while we caught up about old and new times.