portrait

Alison Zavos of Feature Shoot recently had the opportunity to sit down with …

I had a fun, cool portrait shoot with Pharrell Williams recently in a small suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Most of my celebrity portrait assignments are in hotel rooms and the first thing you have to consider when you arrive is: How do I turn a room I've seen a thousand times into a photo studio?

I get a call on Saturday, February 28th, 2015, telling me “The Champ can give you an hour if you can pick him up at the hotel in 10 minutes”. “I'll be there in 8," I say to the person on the phone.

This "Champ" they are referring to is none other than Evander Holyfield, 4-time heavyweight champion of the world, and I am being offered an opportunity of a lifetime.

Ok, let's just be honest for a second here: everyone and everything in the world looks drastically cooler with wings. Period. It's just the way it is.

In middle school when I was heavily into my "drawing magical fantasy creatures" phase (it never ended by the way... just ask my sketchbook), I used to check out this "how to draw animals" book from the library all the time. Really they should have just given it to me, I had it checked out so often.

After weeks of being teased through an enigmatic campaign, the Samyang 135mm f/2 has now been officially announced. It's a full frame manual focus portrait lens with an attractive price point.

The next time you're taking a group snapshot, cut the "cheese" and tell everyone to say "cheeks" instead. This two letter change can help create more genuine smiles on the faces in your shot.

This year, the White House hosted its first ever Maker Faire, and amongst the barrage of incredible creations presented stood the elaborate camera/scanner/light setup responsible for capturing, rendering, and printing the world's first 3D printed presidential portrait.

As Movember, or No Shave November, or whatever you're calling this month of bearded and mustached madness and charity, comes to a close, we're sharing perhaps the most appropriate photo series we could find.

A set of three images captured for the razor brand Schick by photographer Troy Goodall in collaboration with animal photographer Stephen Stewart, Free Your Skin features quintessential hipsters showing off beards made of... fuzzy animals.

For photographer Brittany M. Powell, debt isn't just the subject of a personal portrait project, it's a harsh reality that she's had to face herself.

Inspired by her own experience with debt and bankruptcy after the financial crisis in 2008, she set out to expose the truth about debt and how it impacts both our society and our personal identity in The Debt Project.

London-based artist Nick Gentry is known for using interesting materials to make his photographic work, and his newest series Synthetic Daydreams is no exception. For Synthetic Daydream, Gentry decided to paint realistic portraits on used, discarded film negatives.

Los Angeles-based photographer Matthew Jordan Smith has long been photographing some of the best known celebrities. In this video, Smith retells the story of one of his most timeless images, a headshot of Tyra Banks captured using only a simple ring flash.

Philippe Echaroux -- many of whose projects we've shared with you in the past -- is back with an interesting, portable project from this year's Photokina. Teaming up with Elinchrom, the photographer set out to show how even a portable, one-man studio setup can produce impressive results.

"Smile" is a common command uttered before pressing the shutter and snapping a photo, but it's not always a real smile that gets captured in the resulting portrait. How well can you distinguish a "real" smile from a "fake" one in a picture?

In the two portraits above, which one is a genuine smile, and which one is more forced?

More often than not, when we look back at old yearbook photos, we cringe at the outfits we wore, the poses we’re in and even the hairstyle that adorned our dome. That likely won't be the case for 16-year-old Draven Rodriguez, whose trying to achieve the... purrfect yearbook portrait.

The goal of almost any portrait is to ensure that the subject being photographed looks their absolute best. That is NOT the case with the newest video and portraits series by Patrick Hall.

Hall instead chose to shock his (willing) subjects with 300,000 volts of electricity and capture the literally and hilariously shocking results in stills and slow motion video.

Author’s note: The below video contains no explicit nudity, but may still be considered NSFW by some -- proceed with caution.

If you’re looking to spice up your portraiture a bit, Smoking Strobes has a neat little trick that you should try out if you don't already have it in your repertoire. It’s done using speedlights, although probably not in the way you normally use them.

Rather than the speedlight being on-camera or triggered through a set of wireless triggers, this method of lighting a subject is done by ‘flash painting’ one pop of the flash at a time.

Most sling-style straps today have a problem: the mounting point. They all use a rather bulky connector or plate screwed into your camera’s tripod mount, so if you’re using a pro body or a battery grip on your camera, these straps make it uncomfortable, if not impossible, to take advantage of shooting portrait style.

To solve that problem, a designer and an engineer have teamed up to create CAMS, a pro sling strap, camera plate and lens plate that are built with the aforementioned problem in mind.

National Geographic's Vincent J Musi will quite literally do whatever it takes to get the animal portrait he's looking for, including kneeling in urine while singing Tom Jones' "What's New Pussycat?" to a growling Snow Leopard... hand gestures included.

Fortunately, the trick works (was it the hand gestures? he wonders), "mesmerized and captivated by [his] theatrical prowess and virtuosit," the Snow Leoppard stops and stares at the yummi, camera-wielding steak. One down, seven to go.

Here's a little something for those of you who need a good laugh this Saturday. YouTube comedy duo Rhett & Link need help... specifically, they need help figuring out some creative duo photo poses. And who better to show them some REALLY creative ones than Comedy Central stars Key and Peele?

Michael Woloszynowicz of Vibrant Shot is back with another share-worthy and thorough tutorial, and this time he's showing you how to fix some of the hair and skin issues that tend to crop up in portraiture.

Mugshots aren't exactly known as the height of beautiful portrait photography, but 30-year-old felon Jeremy Meeks' mugshot is something else entirely. Within 24 hours of the photo being posted on the Stockton Police Department's Facebook, Meeks' glamour shot had received over 23,000 likes and nearly 6,000 comments... as of this writing those numbers are up to over 87,000 likes and over 11,300 comments.

It's safe to say this image has gone well and truly viral, turning Meeks into a meme and sparking everything from Photoshop spoofs to a 'Free Jeremy' Twitter campaign.

As one of the best-known and respected portrait photographers in the business, Tamara Lackey certainly knows her stuff when it comes to capturing life’s most intimate moments. In this video, part of her series in collaboration with Nikon, Lackey shows you how to shoot a quality romantic portrait session.

If you're new to the world of studio portraiture and you've noticed that the skin tones in your photos are often turning out wrong, it's possible you're getting color contamination from the ambient lights in your studio -- be that a bank of windows or overhead lights.

Lindsay Adler and CreativeLive want to help you clear that up, and so they've published this short snippet of their Skin 101 course to explain how best to avoid this issue.

Keliy Anderson-Staley is an assistant professor of photography at the University of Houston. Her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, the California Museum of Photography and the Portland Museum of Art, and is currently on view at the Houston Center for Photography.

Her book of portraits, On a Wet Bough, is forthcoming from Waltz Books. She is represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery.

Butterfly lighting is one of the oldest techniques for lighting a subject. Named for the butterfly-shaped shadow that forms underneath the subject’s nose, this setup is a proven method to ensure your subject is well-lit in a pleasing manner.

Photoshop's Content Aware Scale tool doesn't get much headline time thanks to other popular features like Content Aware Move and, of course, the vilified Liquify tool, but it can come in extremely handy in a few situations.

Author note: There is some NSFW language and violence in this video, might want to save it for home.

What do Polaroids and Hot Pockets have in common? 99.9% of the time nothing. But, thanks to Berlin-based fashion and portrait photographer, Oliver Blohm, there’s that .1% remaining. To create that .1%, he has literally developed a way in which to combine Polaroid film with a microwave to create some very... unique photographs.

Back in January, we featured the story of Anthony Carbajal, a California-based wedding photographer whose career came to an abrupt end when he was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. After the story broke, media journalist Avni Nijhawan created the above video that offers a touching portrait of Carbajal's life and struggles.

One of the issues talented photographer and retoucher Michael Woloszynowicz often runs into when he's taking portraits is mismatched skin tones. Using a light modifier of some sort he'll get the tone he wants in the face, but the tones or colors in another part of the subject's skin simply don't match.

You could correct for this using curves, selective color or hue/saturation, but Woloszynowicz has a better way: using solid fill layers and tonal averaging, he's able to "take the guesswork" out of it and perfectly match tones every time.

Taking one small step for photography (or is it 'a photography'?) and one giant leap for Instagram, the first Instagram post from space was posted this past Monday by an astronaut currently residing at the International Space Station.

Back in 2007, world-renown visual storyteller Platon took on an assignment to capture a photograph of Russian president Vladimir Putin. In what would end up being one of the scariest assignments of his life (which is saying a lot given some of the stuff he's covered), his portrait session for TIME's person of the year award involved just a few more guns and guards than most.

Using an industrial–strength robotic arm, custom software, a Canon EOS Mark ll and a 180mm macro lens converted into a telecentrical lens, Swiss photographer Daniel Boschung has created an automated portrait machine. Made to map out "Face Cartography", the machine and resulting images capture incredibly detailed and hyperrealistic photographs of subjects.

Here’s a small piece of history that’ll get you going and inspired to take on the week: a photo …

We're not in the habit of sharing full workshop videos during the week. The way we see it, most of you are at work right now (we sure are) and don't have time to watch a one and a half hour workshop at your desk (we sure don't). Problem is, this 1940s Glamour Portraits workshop by Robert Harrington can't wait.

Do you have half a million dollars burning a hole in your pocket and the desire to purchase an extravagant portrait? Well, today is your lucky day, because Platinum Sphere Portraits is just what you're looking for.

No matter who it is you're photographing or where you're taking their picture, it's almost inevitable that in at least a few shots there will be some stray hairs flying across the photo. Usually, the result is an extra hour or so in post-production trying to get the hairs out one-by-one. Cue infomercial guy saying: "There has to be a better way!"

There are many ways to remove color casts from your images in Photoshop, but this tutorial by photographer and retoucher Michael Woloszynowicz offers one of the quickest, easiest and most effective methods we've seen.

ZEISS is touting its latest release as a "perfect" portrait lens with serious Macro chops to boot -- a 50mm, f/2.8 model for APS-C cameras sporting Sony E and Fuji X mounts.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery very recently unveiled a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II that might just rank as the most legend(wait for it)dary portrait of a monarch ever taken. It's titled, "Queen of Scots, Sovereign of The Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of The Thistle and Chief of The Chiefs" and the name only partially does it justice.