1001 Photography motive # 65 Political Portrait

The January weather in Iceland is not feasible for much of a outdoor work. At least not these days. The first days of the year where fine but now while it is freezing in europe Iceland is warm and rainy. So that is a good time to dwell in the studio or on location and do some portrait photography.

Political portraits are amongst the most difficult you can do. Its not only about some stylished setup with fancy surroundings like you can do in a music magazine portrait nor is it the type of setup you can do in corporate portraits.

In political portraits you have to show the person in good light and get the best of the subject to show in a simple and homely manner so that the viewer wants to trust the person. Therefore I think it would be a big challenge to take a portrait of some one whose political views you oppose to.

I have taken portraits of candidates from just about every political party in Iceland and usually been happy with the results. This time I was though more happy tan before. I actually think I did one of my best political portraits so far.

The fact that the subject is my sister might come in play here and help but I do not think so. She is camera shy and I had to remove that barrier. She had been working a long long day and the image was taken close to midnight. Still I got what I wanted with a help from my daughter that did the makeup.

Its all in the eyes If you do not get that glimp in the eyes the image is dead.
Then of course it is minimum Photoshop. Plastic look is a tabu in politics. You might want to party with Ken and Barbi but you will not trust them to run your municipal let alone your country.

For this simple setup I used three lights two on the model and one on the background.
Lightroom and Photoshop gave the color rendering and final touch up

It was shot with Canon 1Ds MKll and 70-200 f 2.8 on f.9.0