Fundamentals of Photography - Is it Different for Landscapes Versus Portrait Photography?

I've decided to post this discussion based on some comments I've seen on my work and work of other photographers. It seems that it is perceived that there is a difference between how a landscape photographer and portrait photographer compose an image. Is there? Both want the same result: images that are pleasing to the viewer's eye without distraction, and without awkward crops. Though, the two categories of photographers seem to accomplish this by entirely different visions. Or are they different? (Some) landscape photographers tend to want entirety, and that is not necessarily true for portrait photographers, but for some it is. 

One element that, in my opinion, leads to both a successful portrait and landscape, is getting the entire subject in the frame. Whether the subject is the whole of something or a piece of something, the subject must be in the frame in entirety.

This is a very simple image, utilizing some of the most basic elements of photography: time of day for light IE sunset in this case, colors, framing, and lines. This image appears on your screen more or less how it appeared in the viewfinder of my camera. Had I gotten only part of one of the windmills in the frame, it would have brought an awkwardness to the outside of the photograph, and it would change how effective it is as an image. Had I gotten too much sky or too much of the black ground, the same thing would have happened.

Had I gotten this with a grayish-blue sky, it would have changed the mood of the image that is achieved with the color. Had the cloud lines been higher, accenting the sky above the windmills, it also would have changed the scene (though I can only credit weather for working out that part of the photo for me.) The hills are curved lines, which harmonize the straight lines in the clouds.

The same basics are essentials to portrait photography as well. When photographing a model, it is important to make sure the crop is appropriate in order to not make her look awkward. For example, cropping at the neck without shoulders makes people look like their neck goes on forever!

Cropping at the elbows or knees can make people look like amputees! So the easiest way, naturally, to make someone look like a whole, real person, is to do a full-length portrait. However, lighting is also important. So is time of day (if you're doing an on-site portrait.) Lines are also very important. You don't want anything in the background bisecting your subject awkwardly (like through the neck, or out of the top of the head, etc.) The image below is a relatively-simple full length portrait ("Snowshoe Man" - Taken on Wolf Creek Pass, Colorado in 2008): 

There are lines in this image - the diagonal line of slope of the hill hits in his torso, at the widest part of his body, and the vertical lines of his poles, and the trees do not cut through his body in any awkward places. There is an implied line formed by his snowshoe toward where his trajectory would expected to continue. If this image were brighter with the colors, it would not show how cold this place was. The man is entering the frame, which shows that he is expected to continue into the frame more. This is less-awkward in portrait photos than having a subject leaving a frame with a whole bunch of space behind, though there are uses for that as well. (This image would be boring were it not for the person, who is the subject - and I would have grabbed the whole tree on the right, like any landscape photographer probably would do had the trees been the subject instead.)

So do landscape photographers crop or move in close to subjects? Do they use implied lines? I follow some other landscape photographers, who most-certainly do utilize the details of an image. Sometimes the sky inhibits the shot, so they don't have sky in the photo. When shooting with Jay and Varina Patel, two such photographers, Jay said, "If there are distractions in your shot, zoom in and focus on the details." The image below ("The Great Sphinx at Giza" taken in Giza, Egypt in 2012) is by far my most-popular landscape photograph of all time and has been on two magazines, sold as prints, and gone wild all over the Internet. But you can't see the whole image. It utilizes implied lines! I zoomed in and focused on the details.

So then if the image is successful... what makes it that way? Had I cropped the pyramid at the point, the line would have continued going on forever, and the pyramid would look infinitely tall, and that's not how tall the pyramid is. Had I only gotten part of the sphinx's face, it would have been equally as detrimental to the photograph. Similarly, the pyramid's diagonal line is hitting the sphinx at a flattering place instead of across the face. Light was key for this photo. I added a few synthetic golden-colored lights to the image to bring out more gold tones to the sphinx as the sun was hitting the pyramid instead. I needed to wait for a nice cloudy day in January at sunset to get the color in the sky with the clouds. A blue sky would have been boring!

Some have said before that I shot this image like a portrait photographer! (Ok so? And what does that even mean?) I also throw like a girl, by the way. How would a landscape photographer have approached this image? Based on some work I've seen by some, I'd say they may compose it similarly if they had the same things to deal with as distractions in the foreground.

The same fundamental of zooming in and focusing on the details comes in to play with portraits, and it is equally important to make sure that lines bisect at natural places (I bet you never thought you'd use geometry in real life, did you?) and that the crop leaves an accurate implication as to where the lines continue. The image below ("The Joker") was taken in a place with lots of distractions, so it was essential to zoom in and capture the subject as a head shot. 

I left shoulders in the frame to show that his neck does indeed end, and one can imagine where his shoulders end based on the angle of his shoulders from his neck. If people have an obtuse angle from their ears and neck to shoulders, the human imagination can naturally place the end of those shoulders, and the more obtuse the angle is the skinnier the person looks. If the person's shoulders make a right angle with the neck, I would advise making sure the end of the shoulders / beginning of the arms are in frame or the shoulders will appear to go on forever and make the subject look obese. There was a slight distraction on the upper left next to his head, but I positioned him so that it didn't continue to the other side. This alleviated the problem of having it appear to go through his head.

I think I have now shown that a portrait photographer and landscape photographer do not have great differences in how they compose an image, but instead would do the other field justice when jumping genres. I have seen portraits done by the landscape photographers I quoted in this article, and I liked them. They were composed well and flattered their subjects. It doesn't matter whether someone is a landscape photographer or a portrait photographer - photography fundamentals are the same. Individual style is what makes photographs different.

A follow-up blog post to this one will be posted soon, using bad images as examples, but until then, maybe try experimenting on your own.

Should I Become a Professional Photographer?

Starting out as a professional photographer is exciting! Chances are, if you are considering the answer to this question, you enjoy taking pictures. However, there is a lot more to being a professional photographer than simply liking the work. This blog post will (hopefully) help you realistically answer that question before you start a business. Some of the information in here is from my own experiences, and some is from the experience of other photographers I have had the pleasure of meeting or working with. Either way, this post is full of solid points that you should consider.

Do you know how to make your business successful? I was lucky because I have a parent who is self-employed, so I knew basically how to run a business before I made one for myself. There is a lot of extra work that goes into a small business that people don’t even realize: paperwork, budgets, even more complicated taxes, lots of time and money spent on advertising, extra bank accounts, extra stress on your credit score, more chances to lose it all unless you set up everything correctly. (More information about all of these areas is discussed in the below paragraphs).

Being a pro photographer does not necessarily mean that you can make your own hours. Most of the time, photographers work whenever the client is NOT working. This means weekends, evenings, federal holidays, etc. You need to be prepared to accept this as a reality if you want to be a professional photographer. You cannot simply set your own hours and expect the client to get off work to get photographs taken by you. Moreover, whenever you are not shooting clients you will be spending “normal working hours” advertising, networking, budgeting, editing, blogging, managing the website, and whatever other chores need to get done. In all reality photographers do not get days off, nor do they usually get sick days. 

Spending money on additional camera gear and software for your computer is NOT optional. It is necessary. However, you don't need to buy EVERY upgrade. If you are going to be a professional photographer, you should be able to buy all the gear you need (or already have it, or have friends from whom you can borrow it). You should have at least two camera bodies, two memory cards with sufficient space, at least 5 batteries for each camera, two battery chargers, flash kits and filters, and necessary lenses to make your art come to life. I would also recommend having a separate computer for your photography separate from your daily use computer. If you intend to sell prints, you will need a professional-grade printer. I started out with a lot of camera gear because photography was a hobby of mine for a long time, and I still spent about $12,000 on expenses related to my business the first year. The other side of this is that you should KNOW all your gear inside and out. This means that you don't need to upgrade your camera until the camera you are using does not suit your needs anymore. The same goes for software. You don't necessarily need to buy every upgrade to Lightroom or Photoshop, but you should HAVE the necessary software if you are going to be a professional photographer.

You will need to formulate solid contracts, and that will mean you must get help doing so. Law suits are becoming more common in today’s society (at least here in the United States), and it would be unrealistic and irresponsible of you as a business owner to operate without taking all legal precautions to protect yourself. Draft a contract about your services - I have one for weddings and one for everything else. Then spend the money to have an attorney look at your contract and help you make sure it will hold up in court. I would also recommend taking an introductory class on business law. If your client has not signed a contract, DO NOT TAKE PICTURES. 

True story: I had a client a while back who wanted some photographs taken for his own business - he is a real estate agent. He and I got along well in the beginning, but he was very reluctant to sign my contract. I asked him why, and he said that he didn’t like bringing the law into his business transactions. Eventually I did get him to sign it. I took his photos in my studio, and sent him some proofs of which I was very proud. They looked like most real estate agents’ pictures. When he saw them he got really hostile, said they looked like [trash] and thought I was lying about my credentials. He told me he wanted a refund and the rest of his prints as a penalty for my bad work or else he would sue me for the amount I charged him plus legal fees. It gets better: he had asked me to use software to make his face skinnier, which took me hours. He agreed to pay the extra $200 I charged for that, but he wanted that money as well. After looking online I saw that he had cropped my proofs so that my name was not visible, severely altered the saturation to make his face look yellow, and then put it on his website.

You might get a similar situation one day and must decide what to do about it. My solution worked out well for me, but I knew about the law enough to know where to find answers I was looking for. If you want to know more about this, I’d be happy to talk about it with you. I use this book for my business law purposes, and I highly recommend it for any businessman, photographer or otherwise: 

The client will not like the same photographs that you like. If you can’t take someone saying “Oh I don’t like the way my smile is in that one” or “eew I look fat” etc. then you should reconsider whether or not to enter this industry. You as the photographer will like the artistic shot, but the client is only interested in the ones in which they look their best. Of course, the fashion of the shot matters as well. You need to let the client choose which photographs they are going to buy - and that means that they look awesome, and so does everything else in the photograph. If you’re ready to be a pro, you’ll get some comments like “eew I don’t like the way my nose looks huge in that one” but you’ll also get some like “oh wow. I like that one. I look beautiful there! Thank you!”

If you charge $100 per hour, you will unfortunately not be making $100 per hour. Why? What the heck? Let’s say you are lucky enough to only spend 30 minutes post-processing / editing for every 1 hour spent snapping photographs. You then are down to $75 per hour. You will also be driving to and from the location, which will take another 30 minutes. Now you’re up to two hours of work for that $100, which means you’re making $50 per hour. You also have to set up the shoot, which requires being there 15 minutes early, and you have to have a consult after the fact for them to pick photos, which could take 45 minutes. Now you’ve spent 3 hours on this. You made $30 per hour.

Don’t forget about time you’ll spend networking, money for advertising, etc. I like to make sure I get a little money from each client to cover my equipment if something happens. This means I typically charge more if I have to transport my lights somewhere or use my camera on the sandy beach or shoot over rugged terrain where things can break.

Bottom line: figure out how much it will cost you to do that photo shoot, and charge that rate. When you factor in all your time, you’ll be making minimum wage.

To be blunt (without knowing you, and without seeing any of your work) is your work good enough to go pro? If you get compliments on your work from your parents, your friends, and your step uncle twice removed, it means that your work is better than their snapshots. But is it good enough to compete with the pro photographers around you? If people offer to buy your work, you know you can compete. 

Your website. You can pay lots of money for a nice looking website, but unless you follow the rules of the great God Google, it will not get seen. Invest the money to have someone show you how to make your website so that it shows up on Google’s search results.

You really do need all the lights and gear to do studio photography.This is also expensive, but if you try to do photography without lights it will not look professional.

Of course none of these are all-exclusive, but I’m sure most professional photographers would agree on these in principle.