any portrait photographers here?

[Frederick Avery]

id like to see your work. hear about your ideas, the pitfalls, the processes.

i doubt ill ever be a landscaper, its just not for me, or products, or the like.

just people.

i know of sally mann and gregory crewdson, but im really at a loss to know who else was a seriously good photographer who used large format.

i know its not an easy thing to do, with long exposures, and people fidgetting. but its most certainly the only reason i got into this, so drop me a line if you too love portrait photography with large format:)

Frederick

[Ed Moss]

Might be wrong but I think Chris Killip used 5x4.

My favourite though is a book of portraits by Nick Sinclair http://www.nicksinclair.com/site/portfo ... _Face.html so simple it's brilliant.

[Paul Mitchell]

www.carls-gallery.co.uk/ While his process (wet plate collodion) is not entirely conventional he does use large format

http://benneh.net/ Ben is also a member here

[Trevor Crone]

Recently started using my 8x10 to photograph mostly full length portraits of family and friends - would like to point it towards strangers in the style of Joel Sternfield who used an 8x10 camera (see his book 'Stranger Passing').

I only produce 8x10, and in some cases 5x7 contact prints. I'll try to scan some prints and put them on here.

B&W Photography magazine featured some of this work of my family and friends in issue 115 (Sept.2010).

I love photographing people just as they are without gimmick of lighting, focusing, angle, etc.

[Ed Moss]

There's also usually a nice monthly portrait thread on the US Large format forum.

Not seen the work of Joel Sternfield before, some really good stuff there.

[DJ]

Hendrich Kerstens uses 8x10 for his photographs, he was one of the winners in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize a year or two ago. Incidentally, this years show is on at the National Portrait Gallery starting Nov 15th, I've been for a few years now, and the quality of images on show is truly excellent.

Then of course you have the old school, the Hollywood era who all used large format, George Hurrell, C.S.Bull, Ruth Harriet Louise to name a few.

Lots of inspiration.

[Marizu]

Large format portraiture is a broad church.
There are loads of really interesting people that shoot portraits on large format and there are a many different approaches and aesthetics.

Check out the Mauri Moko portraits by Hans Nellemann.
Martin Schoeller shot the female body builder portraits on large format. There is a you tube video that shows one of the shoots. The model probably can't see him because of all of the lights but he talks her through the whole process, keeping her at ease while rattling off 10x8's like a machine.
Deborah Parkin has been (somehow) shooting portraits of her children on 5x4 Fujiroid.
There is an interesting behind the scenes look at a Chrisopher Nisperos shoot on the Schneider site. Reading that was the first time that I thought about making a portrait exposure of multiple seconds.

Many people in this forum are interested in extracting the maximum sharpness and detail from their film exposure which is fine and a real art in its own right. Portraits shot with longer exposures will not necessarily exhibit this extreme sharpness but will still show smooth tonality and very fine grain at large sizes. Large format flash portraiture, on the other hand, can reveal every last pore.
The collodion crowd seem to concentrate on portraiture (probably because it saves lugging a dark box out to landscape locations). There are countless breathtaking portraits on Quinn's forum. I did a wet plate course with Carl Radford and have shot some portraits using it.
Due to the collodion's speed, they are long exposures (3-30 seconds) which sometimes leads to movement in the subjects.
I think of them more as lyrical documents rather than literal captures.

[Frederick Avery]

plenty to be getting through there, thanks very much!

frederick

[Matt_Bigwood]

Richard Avedon's 'In the American West' is a collection of black and white portraits all shot against a plain white background using 10"x8".


The mystique of this project was somewhat dented when I read that Avedon had shot 18,000+ sheets of Tri-X throughout the project, but the whole thing has been stored in a museum archive in the USA.

http://www.shotaddict.com/tips/article_ ... pher..html

[Trevor Crone]

SNIP; Many people in this forum are interested in extracting the maximum sharpness and detail from their film exposure which is fine and a real art in its own right. Portraits shot with longer exposures will not necessarily exhibit this extreme sharpness but will still show smooth tonality and very fine grain at large sizes. Large format flash portraiture, on the other hand, can reveal every last pore.

Due to the collodion's speed, they are long exposures (3-30 seconds) which sometimes leads to movement in the subjects.
I think of them more as lyrical documents rather than literal captures.

You've struck an interesting chord with me as I've struggled somewhat with sharpness relating to subject movement using the 8x10 camera. A couple of times having to re-shot because the subject moved during a long exposure. I think it is too easy to be besotted with sharpness when a slight motion blur in fact shows the subject is at least alive and animated

[dave_whatever]

If anyone isn't familiar with the work of the late Angus McBean i would suggest you check him out. He did a lot of theatrical and surrealist portrait work starting back in the 1930s, pretty much anyone who was anyone in film/stage. He I think used mainly glass (half?) plates and used hard lighting to great effect. I'm not much of a portraiture man, but i find his work fascinating, I had the fortune to drop on an exhibition of the best of his life's work a few years ago in sheffield.

[BennehBoy]

I shoot a lot of portraits, from 135 up to 8x10.

Have a look here -> http://flickr.com/bennehboy

Some LF portraiture shooters:

Richard Renaldi
Alec Soth
Larry Sultan
Mitch Epstein (lot of urban landscape too)

many more...

[Frederick Avery]

fantastic - this was more what i was looking for.

[Frederick Avery]

what film do you use?

[BennehBoy]

Mainly Fuji 160S, 400H & 800Z

8x10 is predominantly 160S & Kodak Ektachrome 64T, yes, that's tungsten film! I got a lot of it cheap from a studio that was selling off it's stock, so I just shoot it with a warming filter and color correct in post process - it works surprisingly well, but I have to pick my moments since I only shoot in available light (approximately 40ASA!).