 The Environmental Portrait. That's today's topic on Deconstructing Photography. Welcome to another Deconstructing Photography. Today we're talking about the Environmental Portrait. Now this is the third in a series of photojournalism topics in Deconstructing Photography. Today we're going to be talking about how it's used, when it's used, and my approach to this type of photograph while working as a staff photographer for newspapers for 25 years. If you've seen any of these journalism videos, you may have noticed a reoccurring theme. There rarely is a lot of time to make these photographs. You've got to be pretty efficient with your time. You've got to make the best photo you can with the amount of time you have, and that might be five minutes. You just never know. As a photojournalist, ideally we'd love to spend a week, days, or even hours documenting, documenting a story. But the reality is it just doesn't work that way. That's just the nature of the business. Sometimes you have to use a portrait out of necessity. There just isn't time to document a story. But there are also stories that you would do as a feature on a person that may not need anything but a portrait. You're just putting a face to the voice in the story. We should talk a little bit about lighting, because that is very important when it comes to portrait photography. Now, I try to keep it simple. That's this type of photography. You've got to be pretty nimble. You've got to be pretty quick. You've got to be able to adapt to what's around you, what's available, what light do you have available. I'd carry a single stroke, and often I'd use it on camera, and I'd rotate the head and I'd bounce it off a wall, off a ceiling. There'd be times where I'd use a sync cord and get to flash off the camera, and then do the same thing, bounce it, or I might put it out here and shoot it at an angle, try to be as creative with it as possible. Every once in a while I might have a second strobe with me to maybe light up the background or something if I had time to plan it out. But I always had at least one strobe, and almost all the outdoor type portraits generally had some kind of fill light for filling the shadows in the face. And sometimes I would have a card on the back of the flash as a fill card, and it might bounce the light off the ceiling and throw a little bit forward to fill in the eyes. Those are the things that I would do on a regular basis, and you can do a lot with one flash and other light that's available. The key here is just keeping it simple and using the available light you have. I think my favorite type of lens for the environmental portrait was a wide-angle lens, something around 24 millimeter. It lets you nice and close, but yet have enough angle of view to take in enough information to add context to the photograph. But you got to be careful. If you use two wide-angle lens and you don't position the person correctly, it really distorts their features. I was never a big fan of anything really any wider than, say, 24. What a typical assignment would look like was I'd go through Porter to interview a subject at their home, business, or location that might be germane to the story. And when we'd get there and make contact, the reporter would often ask me if I'd rather do the photo first or should we do the interview first? And if I could, I would always opt for the interview first. Now that might not leave me a lot of time at the end for a photograph, but what it did allow me was to get an idea what story's about. It might give me some ideas of what I might want to photograph, how I might want to photograph this person. It gave me a chance to look at the environment around and see if there's a location I might want to photograph this person. And it also allowed me to take photographs of this person while they're being interviewed. Now this isn't really, I don't know if really you could call this a portrait, but it really served the same purpose as a portrait. It was just putting a face to the voice in the story. Sometimes it was the best image, because some people just really get stiff when you put the camera up. They stiffen up as like deer in headlights. So as an insurance policy, I always took pictures of them being interviewed. And if we were interviewing them in a field or a farmer's field or something that gave context to the photograph, whether they're looking straight at the camera, whether they're just talking or showing you something. And I was fortunate enough to work with really good reporters that realized that it was best for us to work as a team. And the reporters realized that they didn't need to stand real close to the subject. They'd stand just out of frame. So they wouldn't mess up the shot. They understood the importance of the image for their story. And there might be times that that photograph, while they were talking, being interviewed was the one we'd use. It was just the most natural. It was a good insurance policy just in case the more formal portrait didn't work out. The environmental portrait can be used for all kinds of different stories, from business, sports, human interest, even hard hitting news. They can evoke a wide range of emotions. It can be a very useful tool for storytelling. Maybe a story about homeless. And I noticed this older fella, which looked like he was living out of his truck, I'd seen him in the same location quite a few days as I went to work. And so one day I decided I'm going to stop and talk to this fella. And so I stood there and talked to him for probably an hour. I didn't take my camera out. I didn't just start taking his picture. I wanted to know his story. So after a while, I asked him if he mind if I took his photograph and he was pleased to be photographed. And I think he ended up making a pretty intimate portrait. I think the picture really told the story of how he was living. A portrait can be sad, like this this elderly man with his carousel horses. This photo of this woman who's a shut-in and hoarder is probably the saddest, hardest photograph I've ever made in my life. If I were to try to make this image less edgy or sterilize it, it would have done this service to this woman's plight. She really was crying out for help. She needed help. And it was my wish and my hope that if someone that could help her saw this photograph, then she would get the help she needed. Let's lighten this up a little bit. How about this series of photos from these high school theater students? How's this saying go? Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil? I basically just let them do what they wanted to do and just got out of the way and made the pictures. People with their pets are always fun. It's often funny how a person might look like their pet. This couple had just finished a restoration project on this historic building. And while I was being given a tour to show the project how it turned out, I'd notice this staircase and I thought there's a photograph right there. So I used it to frame the couple. It was a great way to show really one of the best details of the project and a portrait of the couple at the same time. These firefighters were getting ready for a competition that involved climbing stairs. So we thought it'd be a good idea to use their training tower as the location for the portrait. It worked out pretty good. Sports portraits are always in demand like this young javelin thrower. I caught up with this young lady just before practice. Didn't really have a lot of time and people were milling around behind her. There was a really busy background. So what I ended up doing was getting real low, shooting at a real low angle, shooting up with the sky and using that as the background. So we're doing this business story on this woman's bead shop. And when we were interviewing her, my head just about exploded. There were just beads everywhere. It was quite impressive. Unfortunately, she was standing in a really good location. So once the interview was over, she asked me where should we do this photograph. And I said right here should do just fine. And I thought it was actually pretty effective. This is a good example of really tying in the environment to the portrait. Well, I hope you enjoyed this series. This will probably be the last photojournalism topic in this deconstructing photography series. There might be something more in the future, but for now we're going to move on to some other topics. There are other general photography topics that I'd like to look at. So we're going to end today's video right here. Until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.