Here’s a nice little video in which photographer Matthew Jordan Smith tells the story of a portrait session he had years ago with American actor/dancer/singer Gregory Hines. After finding himself in a sticky situation with a subject that wouldn’t offer the personality and emotion Smith wanted to capture, he reached deep into the knowledge of Hines that he had accumulated through his research; one particular fact saved the shoot. Read more…
Musicians, and all creative types really, often cross over into other creative endeavors that may or may not have anything to do with the field they’re famous for. It was only a few weeks ago that we featured a video of musician Moby talking about how much he loved photographing LA architecture. And today Leica has put together another of their “Leica Portraits,” this one on soul musician — and, of course, photography enthusiast — Seal.
The video does have the necessary Leica plug (around 2:30) but besides that everything that Seal talks about — from trading photo time for play time with his daughter, to the emotional connection he feels is necessary for great street and portrait photography — is interesting and relevant to anybody who loves the art of picture taking.
Everybody has had pictures taken that they can hardly stand to look at. Even professional portraits that eliminate blemishes and show you in attractive poses sometimes look strained, or emotionless. Well, a recent study published in Experimental Brain Research seems to say that the remedy could be as easy as turning the other cheek. Read more…
Emotional Breakdown is a cool new web app that attempts to gauge the mood of the world every day by analyzing the photographs found on The Guardian’s 24 hours in pictures. Using facial recognition technology to find happy, sad, angry, surprised or neutral faces in the images, the app creates a colorful pie chart breaking down the emotions. From the chart above, we see that the world was mostly neutral, surprised, and happy today.
Even cooler is the fact that you can also run the tool on any other URL. Try your own photo collection to see what emotions you’ve been capturing in your images.
This video by FotoTV features “microstock king” Yuri Arcurs leading a workshop and imparting all sorts of useful tips that you’ll find useful even if you have no interest in doing microstock — things like working with models and capturing emotion. Get out your pen and paper and start taking notes!
