Fine Art Photography: How to Create a Unique Self Portrait

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Maureen Eggleton. I am a portrait photographer here in Los Angeles. I help work with models and agencies in cities like Tokyo, LA, Shanghai, and Mexico City. Throughout my career, I've been very passionate about fine art portrait photography as it allows me to express my point of view about an idea without any constraints. In this class, I'm going to show you all my creative process so that you can take your own fine arts and portraits in the comfort of your home. I will teach you the same techniques I use to get inspired and come up with cool ideas for your portraits. I will also share some tips and tricks to find out what is the best place to shoot depending if you have natural light available or perhaps you have a lamp. You don't need any fancy gear to achieve great images, so don't worry about it. I will also take you behind my camera so that you can see how I take myself portraits in a tiny space, as well as how I edit them in Lightroom and Photoshop. This is going to be exciting because it is the way you will be giving your artistic style to your photography. Something that is very cool about this class is that it is focused on the developing your creativity and encouraging experimentation rather than following rules. At the end of this class, you will be ready to apply these creative skills, not only to take some portraits but also to take a fine art portraits for other people. This class is aimed at any person who love to unleash their creativity to create something personal with whatever they have available, or an introduction for those interested in the fine art portrait world. I can't wait to see what you create, and if you have any questions or have any comments, please let me know in the discussion section below. I'm here to help. Thank you very much and see you soon. Bye-bye. [MUSIC] 2. Project Introduction: Getting Ready: Our goal for this class is to create one fine art self portrait that tells a story or communicates an idea or feeling. It could be an experience you have in your life, something you are passionate about, or whatever you want to say that represents your inner world. For example, from my last series, Agnostic Getting, the idea I came up with develop with the same thing that I'm going to show you in this class is how recognizing myself as I am through vulnerability. What I love about the fine art photography is the freedom to create something personal that showcase our unique perspective without any constraint. We'll keep it simple, creating with what is available. Basic knowledge of your camera and 18 software would be helpful. I personally use a DSLR camera, tripod and remote control, and a window or lamp as light source. No fancy equipment is needed. If you don't have a tripod, you can always use a table or a stack of books to place your camera. If you don't have a remote control, you can use a timer settings to achieve the same result. For edition, I use a Lightroom and Photoshop. But if you don't have the Lightroom, that's totally fine. You can achieve similar results in camera with Photoshop. This is the perfect opportunity to build your problem-solving skills, which will come very handy when developing other projects. Before we jump into action, I have some advice for you. Start with the right mindset. I chose this break because it brings freedom of expression to the beginners and professionals alike. This is not about perfection or following the rules of photography. This is all about expression, experimentation, and creativity. When creating self-worth flits, it's helpful to understand that feeling awkward or vulnerable infront of the camera, it's absolutely okay. If you feel uncomfortable, you can always start by choosing other parts of your body and photo shoot them. For example, your hands, they can also tell the story. You will feel frustrated and stuck sometimes along the process, and that's absolutely okay. All artists go through that. Just keep going, embrace it, and enjoy the journey. With that being said, let's open the doors to our inner world. Don't forget to share yourself portrait in the bridge section, so that we can enjoy your perspective, and also to give you constructive feedback. I cannot wait to see what your create. See you in the next lesson. 3. Get Inspired:Feed Your Imagination: There are many ways to get inspired. In this lesson, I'm going to walk you through one of my favorite techniques so that your brain gets fed with creative elements. This will help you in the process of crystallizing the main idea or story for your self portrait. Before diving into our inner world, I encourage you to find what I call my happy place. My happy place means sitting on my puffy couch, I put my earphones on, nobody is around so that I can really be in my inner world getting inspired without any distractions. But for you, your happy place could mean something different, like the beach or a park. Are you ready? Let's dive in. Choose one or two activities that brings you joy. You can watch music videos, listen to music, watch movies, read poems, revisit photos and may be some to your last travel travel, that's something that really gives me inspiration. Watch a documentary or, for example, photographers and painters works, that really helps as well. Take a walk. For those of you that may have many ideas already written down, read them again, because that can be also source of inspiration.I highly recommend that you spend 30 minutes of the very least of this activity and to observe and listen to the details deeply. For example, if you're watching a movie, make sure to pay attention to colors, sounds, wardrobe, or if you are going for a walk, you can also bring your cellphone and take snapshots of the things that draw your attention or even record the sound of the bird. Remember, getting inspired means to let your mind absorb information from other places, so that you come up with your own idea. Copying is not an option. As a reference, the photos in my series [inaudible] were born from an inspiration I got after watching many music videos that have contemporary dance, search the videos of Sigur Ros. I also get inspiration from using videos that are sad, melancholic music that has low beats, lyrics, renaissance painters like Botticelli. I love his work and other photographers like bitter Lindbergh. But you may love heavy metal, unicorns. Make these process your own. Feel free to take some notes about what you watch or listen. I actually have a notebook especially for that, but do not worry so much about it because in the next lesson, we will use all those elements that inspired you to narrow down the idea for yourself portrait. This is it for now. Enjoy getting inspired, give yourself some time to observe the information in your subconscious mind, and see you in the next lesson. 4. Narrowing down the idea: 6 easy steps: Now, that we have infused our brain with grail elements, I'm going to show you one of the same processes are used to create my personal work. I choose this process as it has prompts that will help you distill all the information you got in your subconscious mind, until we narrow it down the main idea for your self portrait. This lesson works in tandem with the previous lesson. I encourage you to watch it first if you haven't done so and then continue with this lesson. You may feel this process is a little bit the structure because it requires you to answer questions, but if you go through the same process over and over, the process will become automatic since your brain already knows what are the questions. Now, when I do this process for example, I don't think about the questions anymore, my writing just flows. Here's a quick look and the steps we're going to work in these lesson. It may look like a lot, but this process takes me no more than 25 minutes plus you will enjoy it a lot. Introspection and clarity assessment. Here you will use your introspection and skills to answer four questions related to what inspired you. Answer the following questions thoroughly. Why did you love or enjoy about what you watched or listened to? Was there something in particular that attracted your attention? If so, what was it and why you were drawn to it? What feeling did you have about what you watched or listened? Can you relate to what your watched or listened to in any way? Write everything that comes to your mind. Just write, write until you lose your fingers. This is an intimate activity where nobody is judging, and the perfect opportunity for you to be just you. For example, at the time I was working on this process for which later be Agnoscere, my responses to the questions were the following. Defining the elements that connect with your heart. These are ideas that will emerge from your responses at the clarity assessment, and they can be used as the building blocks for your self portrait. Now, that we have our answers, what I do is to underline the words that connect and resonate with my heart the most. The ones you feel, yes, this is it, I have to work on this. The goal is to filter as much information as we can so that we can come up with the main element. Let's take a look at my process. These are my chosen words or elements, and I feel a very strong connection with them. Now, that we have underlying the elements, it is time to define or choose the main element. The element would be the central worth, the main idea about your self portrait. In my case, my main idea behind each photo in my series Agnoscere was recognized. Now, is the time to write a statement about the main idea. The statement means a declaration about what is the main message in your self portrait? In other words, it would be, what is your self portrait about? This is what my portrait is about and as you can see, the word recognizing is included which is my main elements. Also, I have included other words or elements I chose. For example, the words imperfection and vulnerability as all of these are elements that help convey the story of my portrait. Do not worry if the people get your message or not because art is subjective. When somebody sees your work, it will mean something different for them. For example, the first time one of my friends so my work erosion, she thought it was something to do with the horror movie in Japan, The Grudge or something like that. But for me is about loneliness and how our bodies will become dirt again one day. She's Japanese so when she told me that, it totally made sense to me. Once I explain to her about my statement, she totally understood where I was coming from. I think the bottom line here is, you cannot control what others think about your work, that's absolutely okay. Create because you love art, create for yourself and do not worry about anything else. If people are curious, they will always read or a statement or look for your statement in your Instagram post, in your website or whatever you post, and they will learn more about you, who you are, and where you're coming from. We are now approaching to the last part of the narrowing down the idea process, and I am very excited because this is the part that I enjoy the most, and I hope you enjoy it as well with me. Let's dive in. Write a paragraph describing your vision. How would you like to use some or all of the elements you underlined to inform or inspired your fine art self portrait? The idea here is to imagine what would you love to see reflected in your self portrait? Write a paragraph describing everything you see in your imagination. As other elements your underlined earlier include actions you may want to see in your portrait. It could be potential poses, you can also include other details such as the type of illumination, if you're going to use makeup or not, or if you're going to use props. For example, you can use mirrors, flowers, jars, as symbols to help you to tell your story. For example, in my photos, I use a lot of flowers because they represent my childhood. He's my vision for your reference. The final step is to create an essay sketch. Very easy like you can draw like a kid, that will serve as a snapshot of how would you like your self portrait to look like. In this exercise, we will use our vision paragraph as well as underlined words and the statement to fit that sketch. Okay guys, as you can see, I do not know how to draw and that's absolutely fine. What I'm looking for is to have a snapshot or road map of how my portrait is going to look like. I like to have it handy because it is always easy to go back and see what I'm missing. I like these because I always see what are my elements and my core element, as well as the props, type of lighting, and all the details. Obviously, this is going to change because I will be experimenting, but it gives me a general idea. So I recommend you to have it handy too. Sometimes I chose words. For example, one of my elements was fusion. It may seem that word is not easy to represent with a prop, however, I know that I can use the word fusion represented by me, hugging myself. Just to give you a little bit of idea of how you can use your creativity to implement your elements without using props. The sketch is a snapshot of how would you like your portrait to be but it is not the law. You can be flexible and change things while you are shooting. To recap, this is how the process looks after following all the prompts. This class is all about expression, flexibility and creativity. If you don't feel like you want to use an element or show it, or don't know how to apply it, feel free to discard it or change it for another element. This is your world and you can change it at anytime. When I was creating Agnoscere, I thought that I want it to be in color. I tried many additions, however, I felt something was missing. I felt the image didn't have a quality or element of melancholy or intimacy I was looking for. Then I chose to change it to black and white and I absolutely love it. I hope you have enjoyed this lesson as much as I did. Thank you very much for watching and see you in the next lesson. Bye bye. 5. Time to shoot: See How It's Done: Now that you have narrowed down your idea, it is time to shoot and bring that idea or story to life. I originally thought I will be remaking one of my self portraits at my series and Nosgere, but I thought it would be so much fun to give it a spin and create a new fine art portrait using the same idea, but this time I'm doing props so that you can see how an idea can be represented in many ways. Throughout this lesson, I'm going to share with you my shooting workflow, as well as what are the creative decisions I take along the process and why I do it, let's begin. The very first thing I do is to make sure I have my sketch handy so that I can remind myself of what idea I wanted to convey, as well as whether the elements I will be incorporating, having this cheat sheet has helped me greatly because I don't have to retain everything in my mind and then I can focus on other things like how I'm posing. Then I make myself comfortable and I start taking test shots to see how the setup looks, for example, shows the lighting looking. By the way, speaking about lighting, I encourage you to take a look around your house and see what type of light is available. For instance, I put myself in the middle of a room and take shots with the shades open and closed, and turning my ceiling lamp on and off to see what setup could potentially fit the feeling I want to convey better. Play around with your lights and see what you discover. Coming back to making myself comfortable, I started taking test shots with my remote control to see if my triple displays in a good position or if I need to readjust. As you can see, my tripled was placed way too high, so I had to adjust it. Most of the time I aim to have the lens plays at my eye level as if I were talking with a friend, I know this placement because a contact with the audience is more personal when you are looking directly to the lens. I also check how everything's looking in terms of potential poses and user props before release or taking the shots. Remember, do you need a remote. Most cameras have save-timer, so you can totally use that feature. Once they feel everything is looking good, I start simple, I have no props and I should over and over to practice different poses, which by the way is way easier when you are sitting. I love this process because it is like a warm up where my body is getting comfortable with the awkwardness of not knowing what to do without holding a prop, it helps me be aware of my hands and it helps me explore how can I pose them. As for the light goes, I chose to start with the shades behind me closed and only have the shades on my left window open, so that I can cover more intimate and romantic feeling and I always tried to leave some distance between where I'm sitting and the backdrop so that I can have more depth of field and the image looks more dimensional and not flat. As I'm feeling more comfortable, I start adding props and from there, the only thing I do is focus on experimenting and constantly checking on the back of my camera to see how everything is looking. I will be changing props, poses and lighting until I stick with a combination of elements I absolutely love and I feel represents what my portrait is about. In this case, I opted for having my eyes covered as it resembles vulnerability and the ability to recognize myself using other senses and to close all my shades and use my ceiling lamp as I absolutely love the dramatic filling and movingness I achieved with this light. Tip, if you opt to use your ceiling lamp or other lamp without diffusion, taking consideration that it may get a more hard than soft light, which will probably make all your lines of expression, eye bags, and skin texture pop. What I do to minimize unflattering scheme is to look slightly odd so that the light falls away, that the skin looks softer if you will, but I never look directly to the light bulb as it may harm my sight. This is it, you're all set. Go on and grade your fine arts portrait. See you in the next lesson. Bye. 6. Editing in Lightroom and Photoshop part 1: I'm very excited because edition is one of my favorite parts. So for this lesson, I will show you how I play around with Lightroom to achieve a melancholy and intimate look, as I describe it in my vision, and also playing with blending modes in Photoshop to add little details like flowers from stock images. These will give the image a little bit more of uniqueness and symbolism. So this is the image I chose to edit, and the first thing I'm going to do is to crop it to get a desired composition. From here, my job objective in Lightroom is to create an image that has a beautiful contrast as I wanted to reflect my vision and also because I will be playing with blending modes in Photoshop and usually contrastive photos work better if you're using blending modes. So the first thing I'm going to do here is bringing up my exposure a little bit, and I will be bringing down darks and shadows, I'm bringing up highlights and whites to achieve this look. I know it looks orange and it looks dark, but it's totally okay. I should draw. So I know I have all the data in my image to play around with all the ranges of colors, lights, and tones. So I'm going to keep the quality, very good quality of my image. I will be bringing down my saturation and also other values so it looks more neutral, less saturated, more natural. I'm looking for more like a creamy tone, if you will. I'm going to be also working in my tone curve to enhance this contrast. Again, I'm looking for a contrast with very well balance and beautiful. I am not looking to something very white and very dark. It's always the balance that makes things look beautiful and with transition between the lights and the darks. I like to really bring colors to the image. So for an example, I know that my shades are green, so I'm going to bring a little bit more of the color to the shades, and I know my skin is getting a green with this lighters. But I'm not worried about that because my gradient is lighter, I would say it says lighter. So the green color is going to show only in the shades just like this, and the color in the skin is going to look beautiful. So it's complimentary and it looks very beautiful together. Just little adjustments again. You will see that I will be cropping and moving things around again and again because I always tune and tune until I get the image I'm looking for, the mood. Sometimes it's a lot of intuition, and I will love, for example, here in the split toning to bring to my shadows cold tones and bring warmer tones to the highlights. So I think this gives a cinematic look, I think, and I just play. I play a lot with my intuition and also, even though of course I have a vision, I also let my creativity and my intuition lead me because I feel like the image is telling me, "Oh, this is the good way." Or, "This is not working." So I don't feel constrained. I'd really play and I enjoyed playing around. Okay. For now, let's go now to change it to Black & White because it's important for me to see how the contrast looks. When you change it to black and white, you can really see the contrast and I really like what I'm seeing. I check my before and afters and as you can see, it has changed greatly and we are really achieving a beautiful look. Always tweaking, always changing little details by runs down, situation down until you get the look you are looking for. This is intimate, this is moody and I I'm loving it. All right. Now, I know that I can also enhance my hair, the highlights in my hair and for that I chose the brush and I will be playing with the exposure and slider. I know you can do it in several ways, but I chose this, I really like this effect, so I'm going to stick with it. If I do not make a line in here, if I had mistakes, it's okay. With Lightroom you can always erase and comeback, it's not a problem, you can always adjust, and I'm going to try to bring more highlights. Let's see. Right now it's too harsh. So not a problem, I'll come back with erase brush and erase what is too much. Adjust and make it balance again. Clean, clean, clean, like nothing happened, looking beautiful. Now I'm going to try again with a softer or a smaller brush and it's not going to be random. I'm going to bring highlights to places where the light hit my skin when doing the photo shoot with my ceiling lamp and just enhancing these highlights, and you will see that if you change it to black and white, you can see that it looks beautiful. If it's very harsh later, you can always adjust, it's not a problem. I love the look I have achieved so far. It is movie dramatic and intimate. So from here, I'm going to hit COMMAND+E if I'm working on a Mac or CTRL+E if I'm working in a PC. This will open my image in Photoshop keeping the adjustments I made in Lightroom. Now, I'm going to go ahead with Photoshop as I want to see how my image looks after placing the flowers or other images with the blending modes. But I could totally decide to keep it as it is because it is already a unique self portraits. I love how main idea is represented so it's an option to keep it as it is. Okay. See you in the next video for the second part of editing in Lightroom and Photoshop. 7. Editing In Lightroom and Photoshop part 2: Welcome back to editing in Lightroom and Photoshop. This is the second part where we will be playing a little bit with blending modes. Let's jump in. The first thing I do is to double-click in the layer to unlock it, and then I pressed CTR J to duplicate it. Now, let's bring the stock image I'm going to work with for this, I got a file and select Place Embedded. I'm going to look for my image. I chose this image from a stock images as it is simple image. I think simplicity works better, but this is only a personal preference. You can choose another type of image. Now, I'm going to press Enter to place it and let's go to explore the blending modes. As you can see, there are plenty to explore. What I do is to check each one of them to see which one will fit my image better. I usually like to use multiply a screen, soft light, and also overlay volatility. I may choose another one. These are fun. This is very interesting effect, not for this project, but I will definitely like to experiment with this next time, perhaps using it as if they were cosmic flowers coming out of my body. I don't know. Something fun. As I mentioned, I really like how multiply looks it is beautiful. Very beautiful, but I also want to experiment with overlay, let's check it out. I really like that one. I'm going to move it around and rotate it. For that, I hit Ctrl T or Command T to transform it and then click and drag it. What I want to do is to make the flowers look as if they were coming out from my hand or as if they were a tattoo. I chose to have flowers in my photo as they are the elements that I use in my photos to represent my childhood. It is very important for me to have them not in all my photos, but I have them in plenty of them. When selecting a blending mode, you see the edges of the image you're blending, not a problem, click on the Adjustment Layer icon and select Levels. Now that I have my Levels Adjustment Layer, I make sure to clip it to the image I want to modify by pressing this icon or by pressing out and click between the adjustment layer and the layer I am modifying. In this case, I'm going to clip it to the flowers. What I'm going to do now is to slide this guy a little bit to the left, which will help bring the lights down and making the edges disappear. Perfect. Now, what I want to do is to raise some parts of the flowers stem and for this, I click on this icon to create a Layer Mask next to the image I'm blending. Then I press B for brush and D, to get the default colors on. Then I toggle between black and white by pressing X and then I select the black because painting black over a white layer mask will erase or hide the stems and I always use my self brush for this type of work. My goal here is to hide part of the stem so that it doesn't looks like I'm holding the flower. I love this part of the visual because I just have to focus on polishing my image by cleaning and taking the white parts of the stems and petals. I love flowers, but I also love simplicity. I think that less is more, so I will be refining my image until I get the right number of elements showing up. Clean, making it look pretty simple, not overloaded. I'm always looking for the details and the needle to an extent will make this look beautiful. I feel the image is a little bit dark. Let's click on the Adjustment Layer icon and select a brightness. I want to bring more light and see how it looks. After finishing refining this section, I'm going to duplicate the flowers so that you can see how you can bring more elements without doing all the previous cleaning. To duplicate the flowers, I group the adjustments on flowers' layers by selecting both and then selecting the folder icon. After that, I rename the folder as flowers, one, Levels I just meant one. I said in Spanish. Right now, with what group of elements I'm working on and then I press Ctrl or Command J to duplicate my flower and my folder not my flower, my folder. This is fun. I have a new set of flowers and from here I do exactly the same as I previously did. I move the flowers around and place them to a deserved place. I also open its folder to select the proper Layer Mask and start hiding or erasing the elements I don't want to show up. Let's play this section with fast-forward as you already know these steps. Feel free to pause or escape to minute 636 to show you how I give this image the last touches and to show you other examples for your reference. This image is looking great. Now, I'm going to select the Black and White Adjustment layer and then a Curves Adjustment layer as the light looks a little bit flat to me. I want the overall image to look a little bit more dramatic, especially if I decide to leave my image in black and white. Let's drag the highlights up and the shadows down until we get the desired look. It is looking great and I refined a little bit again with my brush because I notice there are a couple of small parts with the edges of the flowers image are still visible. I always make sure to check how this is evolving, cleaning everything, making sure that I don't have more edges. It is important to be specific sometimes. One thing I'm noticing is that the first thing my eyes drawn to is my hair. This is happening because the level of highlight there is greater than the rest of the image. To fix this, I'm going to create a Brightness Adjustment layer. Then I will bring the brightness down. Then I'm going to select a Brightness Layer Mask and press Ctrl I, convert it to black. Having the layer mask black will hide or make invisible the changes of brightness I made and then with my brush, I paint with white to make visible only the changes I want to show. Remember that you can always adjust the changes by dragging the opacity and always check your field before and afters by clicking on the icon on and off. We are almost there. Looking beautiful. In color and black and white both are so beautiful. We're almost there. I'm going to save by pressing Ctrl or Command S. Since I brought the image from Lightroom, this will appear right there with the octets I made in Photoshop. To export your image from Lightroom, go to file and then export. These are my general settings. I always name my files with the year, the month, and the day, as you can see. I mostly export in JPEG, RGB as you can see it here. If I'm going to post on social media, I choose 1,200 pixels, that's more than enough to post on social media in the long edge. Like this. The last step is to choose a standard screen sharpening. That's like the last touch I give to my photos. We are ready to export. Here is the image I worked on plus other examples I made with blending mode so that you can see how one portrait can tell a story or represents an idea in many ways. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and I am excited to start editing your images and give them your artistic touch. This is the last lesson, but don't go anywhere because I still have some thoughts to share with you. See you in the next video. 8. Final words: Well, this is it. Congratulations, and thank you so much for taking my class. I hope you found it valuable. Also, I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did. We covered many great topics from what you can do to get inspired to infusing your self portrait with your creative style using Lightroom and Photoshop. If there's one thing I hope you take away from this class, is to never stop creating and experimenting. There is always a way to create with whatever we have available. With that being said, I wish with all my heart to see what you created, so don't forget to upload your project to the project gallery on the class page. If you would like to leave a rating and review, I will be very grateful because it will help me grow an amazing community of creatives and give more value to more students. If you have any questions, comments, or have feedback to improve my class, please let me know in the discussion section. I'm here to help and always committed to give you the best quality of class. Thank you very much again, and see you soon.