Quote:
Originally Posted by sydney1987
Apparently I'm camera phobic or something. Anybody else have this issue? I think I look weird/different in pictures. People tell me I look much better in person but I kind of would like my photos to turn out well too.
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First, one needs to get a very good grasp of the significance that a photograph is not and never will be "reality". Instead it's a slice of time, at some given angle, with a certain perspective, exposure, contrast, color balance, etc etc. In going from the actual scene to what you view, the
photographer's imagination is at work. And that is an inherently traumatic transformation too! First we slice off all of life before that instant, and then we ignore all after too. We stop all motion; and we make a 3 dimensional object reflect the light we wish a viewer to see from a 2 dimensional source. And after all that surgery on reality, we say, "That's Joe!" Except it isn't, and isn't even close...
It's worth reading an essay by Susan Sontag titled "On Photography" to get a deeper perspective. Photography affects the way society views actions that are violent, and it is violent in itself! Sontag said "To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."
So the trick for a portrait photographer is to find exactly the right slice of time, the one that emphasizes the desired characteristics rather than the undesired ones. And many times it isn't easy simply because a still photograph is just that, still; and the person is animated, with personality that comes from body language, movements, and things that do not reflect light. Picking a moment when what does reflect light matches what doesn't... is the crux.
Sometimes it reveals things of interest. Several years ago I worked with a fellow who I thought of as one of the most pleasant, easy going, nice to be around people I had ever met. How nice. Then I happened to have the occasion to shoot half dozen or so pics of him at an event, and was really in for a surprise. Stop the action, take away body language and motion... and this guy was on of the most physically intimidating people I've ever photographed! Then it dawned on me how and why he had developed such a pleasant personality! He
had to be twice as nice as anyone else, or he'd scare off everyone!
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