Portrait Photography | Expression Beats Perfection
© 2011 Wazari Wazir | Mother and Son | Blue Valley | Cameron Highlands
“Epression beats perfection any day of the week, and if you have the most perfect photograph in the universe it’s a zero if you have no expression from your subjects.”
– Bambi Cantrell –
When it comes to portrait photography, I’ve to agree with Bambi Cantrell quote above “Expression Beats Perfection”. If you are familiar with portrait photography, more or less the pose is almost the same but what makes each portrait differ from one another is the expression from the subjects, whether they are smiling, laughing, serious or sad looking face. There is so much we can say about the person just by looking at his/her expressions.
Sometimes as a photographer, we are too concern to take a perfect photograph and tend to forget what’s really important, the moment or the expression when it comes to portrait photography. The reason I share the photograph above is that, I like the moment and I like the expression from both of them, a mother having a great time with her son. There is nothing much in the background to add into the context of the story here. Just an empty road with thick mist in the background, where my wife holding my son standing on the side of the road, doing nothing but just having a great time together.
If you are familiar with World Press Photo Competition and take your time going through the winning photographs especially when it involved people photography, you will notice that among the great photograph that have win the competition is the photograph of a person with such a great emotional expression. Take a look at the winner of the World Press Photo of the Year 2004 where a women mourning a relative killed in the Asian tsunami which was taken in Tamil Nadu India. It is just a simple photograph with a simple composition but the expression from the women is extraordinary, you can almost feels her pain and losses and I’ve to tell you this.
The winning picture is far from beautiful but nevertheless it is such a very powerful photograph and if you take your time to go through all of the winning World Press Photo in the past, you might found that some of them are blurred, lacking in technical perfection, badly composed but they catch the eyes of the judged because the “expression always beats perfection.”
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