Finally the first day of the long anticipated portrait course I wrote about has arrived last Sunday.
Martin Szipál, instructor, master of portrait photography, is in his eighties, full of energy and charm. He arrived for the occasion wearing black leather trousers, black turtleneck, black shirt, black jacket, designer glasses and wide smile. He started to speak right in the waiting room of the studio. He is a great story teller and was telling us lots of stories during the class. I’ll quote his words many times throughout this writing. You will see that Martin has very strong opinion on certain things and he is not afraid of expressing that. But come on, at his age it should be OK. You don’t expect from your grandpa to behave.

He started with saying that everything is mathematics. Pictures are to be composed into geometric shapes and angles. That way the photo will look great and will capture the eye. There a few rules that are to be kept. Pictures are not to tell stories but to please the eye. Harsh? For me it was.

We were watching through lots of his pictures. He was shooting quite some celebrities of the old days.

Apparently it was - maybe it still is - a good business shooting beginner actors and actresses for 500 bucks making pictures for their portfolio. His competitors were angry with him because he asked for the fee only if the model was satisfied with the pictures. Some of them were not able to pay at that time, even though they were satisfied, but paid in two months time when got the role.

“You must have your own style. Your pictures must resemble to one an other. Photos of a good photographer must be identified as a good painters paintings. Once an actor for whom I made portfolio shots called me with anger in his voice. He said that he had just been on a casting where the casting director and an other guy looked at his photos and had said that the pictures must had been made by Szipal, Hollywood, and from that point they had been talking about Szipal for 20 minutes not even looking at the poor actor.”

“When shooting you have to have a concept. There must be a reason why you make the photo the way you make it. There must be an objective and the photo must achieve that objective. When shooting an ad, people on the photo should not dominate over the thing being advertised. When e.g. you are about to advertise a wrist watch, the beauty of the woman’s hand should not draw the attention from the actual watch.”

“They asked me where I find the great locations for my pictures. It was like this: I had my studio on the Sunset and 100 meters from that there were the hills.”

“They asked me how I shoot a portrait and I said I make the model’s make up, her hair, tell her what to do and how to pose and make the shot. The actual shooting is about 10 percent of the whole thing. You have to be the director of the photo. If the models are dancers you should rather be a choreographer.”

One of his photos was a lady’s moody portrait and a bunch of candles ‘lighting’ her face. He said that he was cheating when making the picture and asked us what the cheat could had been. I looked at the face and noticed that something was not OK with the candle light. Did some reverse engineering starting from the highlights and shadows on the lady’s face (thanks to David Hobby who made this a habit of mine) and I raised and said that there must had been a light source above the lady camera right. And guess what - I was right.

“Do you think that they just went there and hugged each other that way? I directed and instructed them what to do to every small details. To their fingers. To their toes.”

About angles and shapes he explained that when you have them on your photo that pleases the eye. The picture becomes good to look at. There are a few examples for that on his site that he showed us on the class too. Something completely new to me. How does one think like that when shooting?

“When I was shooting Bobby Womack for an LP cover the creative director brought in an old chair and said that we can use it in the picture the way we wanted. We were making a few shots. Then all of a sudden Bobby put his guitar on his shoulder and started towards the door. I screamed at him to stop. Brought him back in front of the the backdrop, set up the light and shot. Look at the curves of the guitar and his head. Those make the picture.”

Contemporary art and especially photography - in Martin’s opinion - is over composed and looks bigger than in real life. He was telling us that today people spend no more than 3 seconds to look at, understand and/or ignore a picture. So pictures must be simple and the message is to be understandable in very short time. We have short time and to many things to do.
I did not really have a clue on what he meant by over composed. Then he showed big empty areas on his photos and really simple backgrounds. That might be that.

Before we started the real thing - shooting photos of a real model - Martin told us about snapshots. He said that snapshots - making photos with a camera being held in the hand - is like when cowboys were shooting from the hip. He is not teaching that kind of photography. For him portraiture photography starts when you mount your camera on a tripod and that’s like when a sniper shoots between the eyes from 2kms. You need your hands to instruct your model. You need to be the director of the photo.

He said that for portraiture long lenses are to be used to avoid distorsion. He, for example, is using a 420mm one. Most of us pulled out our 70-200 lenses and our jaws dropped when he put his hand into his small bag and pulled it out with a Panasonic Lumix FZ30 in it. He likes it very much, he said. I felt myself somewhat ridiculous holding that huge and heavy lens in my hands.

The practicing started with the ‘traditional’ light set up: 3 strobes, one main and other fill and a third as hair light. It was metered for ISO 200 and F10. We were requested not to move the lights because that would involve metering again. I did not really like that. I would have wanted to play around with the strobes a bit. Everyone made a few shots instructing the model. For me shooting a completely stranger girl was kind of embarrassing. Here are a few shots that I made with this setup. With her arms in her hair I wanted to have some angles as Martin explained (desperate move?) and also show her neck. With only her face on a photo it was just too flat. Martin said that this kind of lighting helps covering imperfectness of the model.

“When you do a head shot, shoot from the same level. Don’t go down to your knees or even lay down to the ground. That kind of photography comes from old Al Capone movies where the movie directors thought it would had looked much more fancy if the photo journalists arriving to the scene would dropped themselves to the ground or even stepped on one another. But you are not to learn photographing from the movies. Mount the camera onto a tripod. Be level. That’s where portrait photography starts.”

After we made our 3-strobe-lit portraits the magic started to unfold. He asked for one single continuous light and two big - with a height of 2 meters and width of 1.5 meters - white boards.

Martin mentioned that he starts portraiture with drawing the shadows and showed us how. He moved one of the white boards close to the model and directed the light to the board. “Can you see where her nose curves?” he asked. Sure, we could see it, opposite to the light source.

“Some says: Don’t photograph me, I’m not photogenic. I tell her: I wouldn’t want to photograph you if you were photogenic. Just imagine that you hold an imperfect cube in your hand - one edge is shorter, or something. You can turn and twist the cube until it looks perfect, right? The same thing applies to photographing a face. You just do it with light and posing. When something is not perfect on the face you want to hide it and when something is beautiful you want to show it. You don’t want to cover a beautiful face or neck with hair. The more perfect the face the less hair you need. See? My face is so perfect I don’t need any hair.”

We made a few shots with Martin’s continuous light setting too and I took a few with him on the scene as well. He lit and instructed the model and I pressed the shutter release. Who was the photographer?

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