 Portraiture is such an interesting genre in photography because, like the famous quote, says, a portrait is not made in the camera but either side of it. As a young photographer, I wanted to be a photojournalist. I was all like, oh, I've been, you know, sort of capper and all that sort of stuff. And then I became more interested in people and individual people. And eventually found myself quite unexpectedly because I didn't really like people. A portrait photographer. And over the years, my style has evolved and it has grown to the point where I won the NPA Olympus Portrait Photographer of the Year here in the UK a few years back with this wonderful portrait of Karen. And I would like to share with you how I found my own voice in portrait photography and the lessons that you can also discover by looking at 10 great master photographers. How's it? How's it? These 10 things I'm going to talk about today and share with you and hopefully that will improve your portrait photography are not maxims. They are not dick tats that are sent down from the gods of photography on high. Okay. They are merely suggestions. And this is the whole point that these are 10 things that work for me and have helped sort of shape my own portrait photography. And hopefully all of them will resonate with you, but some may not. And that's okay. This is the joy of photography is that we take what connects with us and we discard the rest. Get close. I know Robert Kappa said if your pictures aren't good enough, then you're not close enough. And Martin Shuler has taken this to an extreme. So he gets really up close and his portraits start to feel less portraiture and more kind of like a study of somebody's face. But the basic point remains, I was told as a photography student that there is a gap between as we're all familiar with this personal space thing. And once you get into that space, people start reacting to you differently, that they become more engaged in the process. So if you are a portrait photographer and you want to bring that connection to your subject closer, try and get closer in. Don't worry about the lenses and proper compression for a moment. Get close, get into their personal spaces, stop making them a participant in the photograph. That neatly segues into influence the sitter, influence, influence the sitter, right? Joseph Karsh, Churchill, we know the story, or maybe you don't. Okay, so here's Karsh, famous portrait photographer. And there's Churchill, big Churchill, this is Churchill with capital C. And Churchill was, as you may know, famous for smoking cigars. And he was quite often pictured with them. And Karsh really wanted some sort of reaction from Churchill. And this is an extreme thing because he leaned over and he snapped the cigar out of Churchill's mouth, right? That's pretty extreme, right? But he got a reaction that he wanted. Now, I'm not suggesting that you do these sort of things, but you need to kind of give the sitter some sort of nudge from time to time. So if you're struggling with your photographs, you don't feel you're getting anything, give them a little nudge. It doesn't have to be, you know, a physical thing or anything like that. But just prompt them in a way that takes them out of whatever rut they've got into. Shoot instinctively. For this, I'm going to draw on Robert Maplesaw. And I really love Maplesaw from a very young age. I don't know why, because some of his work is like challenging. But if you look at his photography, right, he just knew he wanted to be an artist. And so a lot of his photography was just the things that he wanted to photograph, especially, you know, the people and his photographs of Paddy Smith. He was just learning the ropes. And I think he was shooting from the gut. And that's, for me, that's the important lesson in this one is when you shoot from the gut and you shoot instinct, your portraits are more connected, because you are responding to something that you can't quite put your finger on, but you know, that is important. A sense of place or a sense of purpose. I mentioned earlier that I, you know, I started off as a photojournalist and or I want to be a photojournalist more to the point. And I was very aware of that it was useful to have context in a photograph. Now, there are many great portrait photographs that have no context beyond just sitter. But if we think back to classic portraiture, sort of Renaissance portraiture and you know, sort of oil paintings and that sort of thing, that quite often they have a lot of information about the sitter in them. And that's kind of what you can do with your photography. Dan Winters is a great photographer. And in a lot of his celebrity portraits, there are clues to the person themselves, right? The famous photograph of Jack Nicklaus, you know, he's wearing an iconic glove. So if you inject some of these little things into these photographs, then they are going to give them more of a place for the subject to exist. If that's the sort of feel and the mood that you're going for. If it's not working, move on. There's a photographer out there somewhere who right now is photographing 10 frames in a row of a subject, thinking that one of those 10 is going to be different. And that's not the case, right? If something isn't working in your portraiture, photographing more from the same spot is not going to change it. You need to change it up. If something isn't quite panning out the way that you expected it, don't make a big production about it. Just say to the subject, you know, we're going to try something new, right? Let's give ourselves a little bit of a shake out, loosey-goosey and just move on and try something different. See what results we get from that. This is a collaborative process. And I know I mentioned how much throughout all of these tips about, you know, getting together with the person. But this is the whole point. You want to be involving them. So if something doesn't work, don't say to them, yeah, you're not doing what I want you to do. Just say, okay, let's try something different and we'll see how it looks from this angle. Try it out. Don't be afraid. Don't be a slave to the gear. There is a photographer whom is a quite a broad statement here. I'm going to understand with that. Sort of help kickstart what we consider to be modern portraiture. He is the antithesis of what we were just talking about, which was giving people a place. And oldie world photography certainly had that, you know, the little canvas backdrops and the paintings and stuff like that. But Felix Nadar dispensed with that and he photographed the people for themselves. He had just the simplest amount of gear. Photography was fairly new and he was working with limited amount of kit. But he managed to create portraits that through the ages conveyed to us so much about the character of the people he was photographing. And that's the key here is that he wasn't relying on kit. He wasn't leaning on kit. He was using what he had, but he realized that the importance of a portrait is to communicate the character of the sitter, at least in these kind of photographs. So don't be a slave to the gear. Have self-imposed limitations. You may have heard this idea about like if you've only photographed with a 50 millimeter lens, then you're going to get better and stuff because you're putting restrictions on yourself. And you can do the same thing with portraiture that you can say, well, I am going to dispense with the fancy backgrounds, the chicksy lighting and stuff like that, that all of that is going to become secondary. That's kind of similar to what we're talking about with Nadar. And I'm going to photograph within these strict confines that maybe it must be only a quarter thing, you know, head and shoulders and what have you. And Andy Gotts is a really good example of this. Now, latterly, I think his photography has evolved somewhat differently. But certainly the work that I was initially familiar with his photography, it was all very much, you know, of a single style. And this is something I think that certainly a lot of new photographers, new people who are new to portraiture struggle with. Is they always trying to experiment with a million different types of lighting setups and things like that, instead of just choosing a platform, giving a stage for that play of portraiture to act itself out on. So put those restrictions on yourself. And you'll find that your interaction with the subject becomes a lot more stronger. I've said it before and I've said it again on this channel, you need to have a voice in your photography. Arnold Newman knew that he wanted to communicate ideas. And I'm thinking specifically of one image in particular. And it's this one. And I'm not going to too much about who this is because there's a whole another discussion. But you without knowing even who it is, get a feeling for this man, right? So Newman had a voice. And the opposite of that, this evil looking person is this photograph of Kennedy. He is Newman speaking about Kennedy. And he's making a statement about this person. Kennedy is very small in the frame, but it is still a portrait of Kennedy and how the weight of government the weight of presidency looms over this this person. Let the subject know what you are wanting to achieve. This is the whole thing. And I think we see it like a a theme that runs through a lot of these suggestions is that it's about involving the person in, you know, with who's on the other side of the camera to you. And so many photographers, certainly portrait photographers don't do it. They just sit and they wait for something to happen. Now, if that's your style, if that's your shtick, that's cool, you know, go for it. But if you are learning portraiture, then you need to interact with it with the with the subject. You need to make them feel like they are a willing participant in this process rather than just some sort of like deer in a headlight, what am I supposed to do sort of thing. If you communicate your ideas with the person who are photographing, then the photographs will be a lot more easy, they'll flow so much more. Now, I don't get a specific photographer, I'm going to give this to you. This is the benefit of my own experience of photographing people who don't necessarily want to be photographed. Don't be afraid to break the rules. Bill Brandt was an enigma. I think safe to say he was an enigma because he photographed so many different things, but his portraiture, which is what I was first exposed to, has an interesting feel to it, because it is completely unlike anything that I had seen at that point. It was distorted figures, it's unwieldy looks, it's portraits with wide angles. And if you spend any time thinking about portraiture at all or looking at what you should be doing in portraiture, then you will see that all these things are against the rules, whatever the rules are. So, don't be afraid to break them. Carve your own path. Do what you want to do. And that goes for all of these things. Use them, don't use them. Most of all, you just must shoot what you want, be your own photographer. If you want to photograph portraits, take these as stepping stones. Take them as suggestions. Take what you need from them and discard the rest. I really hope you enjoyed this video. If you are interested in finding out more about Dan Winters, who I think is an excellent portrait photographer, then check out this video right here.