Expressive Portraiture
© 2010 Wazari Wazir | Expressive Portraiture
For those of you who are familiar with my son portrait will notice my familiar background here, it is a wooden plank actually, a door to be exact. Most of my son portrait were shot at this location just next to my house. The pose of my son doesn’t change much, in fact the pose almost look the same but what I’m trying to capture is not the pose itself because my son doesn’t know how to pose, I just want to capture my son expression, each and every time the expression is different and about this expression, I don’t know what it means, actually it is funny expression if it is in a color version, my son wearing a yellow t-shirt, just to let you know.
Sometimes certain color will have an impact on our mood on our perception, for me personally I don’t like bright color, I like to wear something like black, grey or anything that is fade in color and maybe because of that most of my son pictures are like that, fade, vintage and classic. To those of you who have keen eye will also notice that I rarely pose a picture of my son wearing a t-shirt where there is a cartoon on it, it is rare, very rare because I don’t like to buy a cartoon t-shirt for my son.
Most of the time I will buy a T-shirt that are plain, just words but no cartoon on it. My son might like cartoon but for the purpose of photography I personally think it won’t look good in photograph and maybe you still remember if you have read my previous post before that when I go out shopping for my son clothes, I will have a photographic vision in my mind, I mean like “does this T-shirt look great in photograph” something like that. As you already know I like taking picture of my son and the clothes that my son wear does matter and it matter so much for me.
Back to the portrait above, we can use the same pose, the same location time and time again but the expression will never be the same and the good things about taking a picture of a toddler like my son age is that, they are innocent, meaning that their expression is pure. I don’t know whether you learn anything from this post, I’m not a good writer but I just wanted to share with you that a good portrait is all about expression, a beautiful portrait maybe beautiful in nature but sometimes lack strong expression.
A portrait is not about how to portray a person to look beautiful in a picture but a portraiture photography is about how we as a photographer can portray a person as an individual, how we can portray their character, their personality, their mood, their life, their soul (if that possible). For me personally a great portrait must touch our heart, a portrait that are just beautiful, just good enough to satisfy our eyes is a beautiful portrait but it is not great. Great and beautiful portrait are two different things. Great portrait will last forever but a beautiful picture will fade sooner or later.
