This was the 7th session of the 8 of the portrait photography class conducted by Martin Szipal.

“When I see a photo in a magazine I do not look at the model’s face. Models are young and beautiful. Shooting their faces is easy, that doesn’t tell too much about the photographer. I check the hands and feet on the photos. If those are crippled then the photo was not made by a real photographer.”

We went through photos Martin made for us as illustrations on how to pose a hand in ways that are perceived as good looking and natural. Unfortunately I cannot share those picture due to copyright restrictions. You should be in the class for those.
But briefly: fingers are to be closed in most of the cases and the hand or hands should be held to form some geometric shapes. I know it sounds strange, but on his photos those hands looked really nice. One finger can be apart from the others occasionally.

“I had a student once, a very talented woman. She kept telling me ‘Don’t tell me anything, I’ll forget it by tomorrow.’ She just rather watched me and she learned that way. Once I saw her making a head shot and she told the model to close his fingers. I screamed: ‘Your are doing a head shot. Fingers are not even on the picture.’ And we were laughing.”

We were then shooting standing figures. The first challange was lighting the model’s full body evenly. Martin instructed us not to use a 2m high softbox. So the lighting for it was two bare bulb flashguns directed to the white wall. When we metered the light this way there was more than one stop difference between the values measured at her head and foot. Then we put black reflecting brollys in front of the flash lights (turned them 180 degrees of course) and the reflected and diffused light hit the wall and back the model much more evenly.

A few rules to keep in mind when shooting more than just a head shot:

• Weight should be on the rare foot.
• Pay attention to the smallest detail: Even the shoes must look good.
• More latinish (if you know what I mean) women should stand in 45 degrees to the camera. (This rule did not apply to our case.)
• Buttoning direction of shirts and coats must be considered: the lens should never be able to look into the shirts.

We were discussing lot of things while the poor girl was just standing there. Suddenly she gone pale white and begged for a chair. I felt myself embarrased. How could’ve we forgot about the model?

We have one more session of this portrait photography class this week and it’s over. We have already covered all the topics mentioned, sometimes even more. I managed to keep my resolution and have not purchased any equipment since the class started. Now it’s getting a bit hard. I’m planning to buy some studio lighting gear. And of course a Nikon D300 body would be nice too. Maybe some upgrade on my PC. And surely a well calibrated and colorwise reliable TFT display. And that’s it. See how strong I am? I’m not buying Apple.

Luckily upgrading my blog engine to the next version (Wordpress 2.5) will not cost any money.

Read about the other sessions:
Portrait Photography Class - Session #1
Portrait Photography Class - Session #2
Portrait Photography Class - Session #3
Portrait Photography Class - Session #4
Portrait Photography Class - Session #5
Portrait Photography Class - Session #6
Portrait Photography Class - Session #8