Pre-Production for Portrait Photography: Finding Inspiration Before a Portrait Shoot

1. Introduction: As a photographer, I'm always interested in making connections with the people I photograph on a deeper level. In part, this is to limit periods of awkward interaction, but most importantly, is to enable me to make photographs that I believe portray genuine emotions. But how does one do this, especially, if it's your first meeting? I believe that the answer lies in the pre-production stage. Hi, my name is Chris Dennis Rosenberg Kimbugwe, a Ugandan photographer based in the Czech Republic. I've been practicing photography for over four years now. My work has been published in The New York Times, the Financial Times and I'm also a recipient of the Adobe Creative Residency community fund, among other awards and grants. Welcome to pre-production for portrait photography, a class to help you prepare for and find inspiration before portrait shoot. In this class, we're going to explore the different processes involved in the pre-production stage and how one can effectively use them to have a successful production. With our primary focus being the creation of mood boards and storyboards we will also explore tools, ideation and techniques, which will help you learn how to better approach making low budget portraits. Our goal for this class is to help you develop a pre-production process that works for you and prepares you to make the most out of the production process. Although, all photographers at all levels are welcome to participate, this class is perfect for beginners who may or may not have top-of-the-line equipment, but just love making photographs. I can't wait to see what you make, see you in our class orientation. 2. Class Orientation: Hi, and welcome to our class orientation. Here's a quick run through of what we're going to cover. This class's primary focus is the first stage of production known as pre-production. Therefore, we're going to talk about idea, and concept development, as well as some of the different tools, and techniques used during the pre-production stage. We will also explore a few of the possible products that can be created during the pre-production stage, namely mood boards and storyboards. Our assignment for this class is to create one mood board, and one storyboard in preparation for a portrait shoot. This can either be analog or digital, that is entirely up to you. But once you finish working on them, please be sure to share with us in the class project page as digital files. While you're working, please remember to prioritize the technical aspects of your idea instead of your ability to draw or sketch well. In the first lesson, which will start shortly, we're going to explore the different tools at our disposal. But before we get into that, please be sure to download the class resource document, and get familiar with its contents. Good luck. 3. Tools: [MUSIC] I believe that one of the most important things in navigating life is having a great understanding of who you are and what tools you have to work with. This also applies in the creative world , certainly my practice. Over time, I have realized that the more I feed my knowledge and understanding of the what, how, where, and why of my photography practice, the better and more satisfied I have become, at least by my measure anyway. Therefore, in this lesson, we're going to look at the different tools that we will use to create our class project. Namely, for storyboards, we will need a pen or pencil and a piece of paper. For mood boards, we will need a pen or pencil, a piece of paper, a tablet or computer of any kind, software like Adobe Photoshop or any that you use. The pen or pencil and a piece of paper will be the most useful for creating storyboards, but they can also be used for creating mood boards depending on how you approach the creation process. I have slowly realized that mood boards can benefit from working with found objects, and this can be photographs, stills from a film or music video, a piece of fabric, a flower, and so many more. Basically, whatever inspires you and informs your specific visual look can go on a mood board. Here are some of my tips for you. Remember that there's a difference between inspiration, appropriation, and plagiarism. Please make sure that whatever you do on however you do it is respectful of other artists work. One of the easiest ways to ensure that you're respecting other artists work is by crediting them whenever you use their work or you're inspired by their work. This is especially important if you use any of their images in any of your work. For example, with the mood board, if it's to be published, makes sure that you credit the people who created the work that you're using in your mood board. You don't have to use everything that is available to you at the same time. Identify the tools that enable you to create the work that you need to create. Use those and changed things up every now and then. To recap, we looked at some of the tools that we can use to create storyboards and mood board during the pre-production stage. These range from software to hardware, as well as made and found objects. We're going to talk about idea and concept development in our next lesson. Come ready to brainstorm. See you then. [MUSIC] 4. Ideas and Concepts: I invite you to close your eyes, and think about what you want your photographs to communicate, visualize that message and write down what it looks like. It is this list that we're going to use as our point of origin. Hi and welcome to this lesson on idea and concept development. To start, open your eyes if you haven't already, take a look at your list and expand on the things you have written down. In no particular order or in very specific order, what is your first word that you are going to expand? Mine is I see a woman standing or sitting alone in a field of forest. She's surrounded by trees and grass. There's light coming through,, and touching her skin. She's wearing a monochromatic juss, no patterns. The photographs will be a mixture of candida and post photographs. Continue to do that for all the other words. You can either write down your expanded thoughts, sketch them out, or whatever else comes to mind that can make this process progress further. Once you've finished expanding the words on your list, start to look for and collect material that speaks to those words, and expand the thoughts. At this point, however, I feel it is important to mention that there is no right way to go about this process. Sometimes ideas come from being exposed to other material and then perhaps we write our thoughts down. But other times ideas come from the process we just started a few minutes ago. Let us now look at some of the other places we can find inspiration and or collect the material that best represents the thought process we're in. Social media, examples include Pinterest and Instagram. Pinterest is a primarily photo based social media platform where you can create your own boards and pin the things that you find interesting. For example, I have a board where I save portraits that I find interesting and inspiring. Films, television, and music. This is my most common source of inspiration for images of all kinds. Regardless of whether or not they become actual photographic work, certain scenes, lines, people, and the issues they briefly touch on spark something in me which I then expand with my own thinking and writing. Creative writing examples include books and articles. Though I don't do enough reading, I must say I like how text inspires visuals. We have all had experiences where we read a piece of writing and simultaneously build up a world full of detail without even being asked. That is what writing does. Try to apply this into your photography. The words you have written down either come from images in your mind or now have to become images. Here are my tips for you. Be mindful of how you use other people's work. Do not copy or steal. If a particular body of work inspires you, make sure that whatever you create is your unique view of the topics and issues that that works so to address. Try to make a genuine contribution. Being too aware of what other artists are doing can also be a double edged sword, especially on social media, so prioritize yourself and your mental well being while looking for inspiration. To recap, we looked at some of the ways we can initiate the idea and concept development process. We also talked about some of the different sources of inspiration, such as social media, films, books, and music. Get ready to explore some of the different techniques used during pre-production. Don't miss out. 5. Pre-production: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to explore and experiment with some of the different approaches you can take during the pre-production stage. The main focus, however, will be on mood boards and storyboards. Before we start, to ensure that what you create is a genuine contribution that furthers the conversation on the subject you're exploring as well as the medium, start by expanding your thinking about this particular topic and perhaps its relationship to photography, your environment, and community. Please take the time to develop your own position about certain things. This is extremely important if your work deals with sociopolitical issues affecting minoritized groups. Let's get into it. There's this thing that I learned called PACE in a workshop in Uganda. The P is for portray, the A is for action, the C is for close-up, and the E is for environment. Basically, this is something that was mainly told for people who are working with news photography and documentary photography. That's how I got introduced to it, but I find that it works and it helps you narrow down exactly what you want to explore. You can use stick figures, it doesn't matter. If you're able to draw, do it. The more detail the better for people who are able to draw, but please don't obsess over your ability to draw. With a portrait, you basically show more of the person in a portrait. You don't necessarily have to show their face. It doesn't have to be extremely sharp or visible, any of that. It can be anywhere from a mid-range shot. It can also be a full body shot, but it has to be clear that the subject or the person is the subject of the photograph, which is different from, let's say, action and environment where there are a few more objects to be observed, and these objects also play a huge role in reading this photograph. With the action, you basically get the person you're photographing to perform some action. If they're a dancer, they can dance. Even if they're not, the person can dance. If they play instruments, they can play an instrument. We can basically do what they do in this space or in their space. Basically get the subject in movement or the object in movement. If it's symbolic, you can throw it in the air, or a piece of clothing, it can be thrown in the air and let it be blown by the wind and then that introduces action to the photograph. A close-up shot of the subject or the object. It can be their face, it can be their hands. It can be a close-up of the outfit they're wearing or a detail from the outfit. Really, it can be anything, but it basically has to reveal something more of the person you're portraying. Then the environment shot is basically just to establish the environment or the scene where the person is. It's perfect if its the person's space. If it's an artist, it's great if you can go to their studio and then capture them in their environment. That's it with the storyboard. Now that we have finished our storyboard, put it aside, allow yourself to forget those visuals for now so that the next time you engage with it you are able to be surprised and inspired in ways you couldn't have imagined before. Let's move on to the mood board. First, we're going to create the color scheme, and we can do this in two ways. The first option is using Adobe Photoshop and a still from a movie, music video, or a photograph and here's how we do that. Now we're going to look at how to create color palettes in Photoshop using an existing photograph. The photographs that I've chosen to use today are stills from the film Moonlight, which is one of my favorite films. To start this process, you simply just open a photograph in Photoshop and then you press ''File'', ''Export'', ''Save for Web''. The things that we need to focus on the most are the optimized file format and the color reduction algorithm. The optimized file format should stay the same GIF, and for the color reduction algorithm, we change it from selective to custom because we don't need to turn up 256 colors, we just need three. You change that from 256 to three and you can see here we have three colors left. Then you go to the color palette menu. Click on that, then go down to Save Color Table. We're going to name this Moonlight 1. I'm going to save this on my desktop just so that we can save time, but I encourage you to create a system for how you store your files because it will be so much easier for you later on when you're working. In this case, I'm just going to save it on the desktop so that it's easy for us to move along, but I will later on move this file to a folder it belongs. We click ''Save'' and we're done with this window and we're also done with this photograph. We can go ahead and close it. We're going to look at one more. This still is also from Moonlight and it's just that it's a warmer photograph, so we're going to experiment with that as well. Same process, Save for Web, and then change the color reduction algorithm to custom, remove 256, and replace it with three colors. We have three colors here. Color palette menu, Save Color Table, we'll name this Moonlight 2 and it's saved as an Adobe color table file. Press ''Save'', "Done", and we're done. That's how you create color palettes in Adobe Photoshop using an existing photograph. Now we're going to import the color tables that we created from the film still in Photoshop earlier, and we're going to do this in the document where we're going to create our mood board. First, you import the color tables into Photoshop and you do this by importing them as swatches. I already have the window for swatches here, but if you don't already have the swatches window open, we go to the menu bar and you click on the Window tab and you go down here and you'll find swatches. If there's no tick beside swatches, that means it's not visible so you click on it and then a tick will come, but it will also open swatches. Here we've disabled it by clicking swatches. Again, we've enabled it and it's feasible. Once you've done that, you go to the swatches window and then you press this button right here and you go to import swatches. Once you click on import swatches, it will open up a window where you'll be able to find your swatches or color tables. Once this window is open, you should now move to the folder where you saved your color tables. In our case, we created Adobe color table files. By default, the window would be looking for swatches, and of course, we didn't save swatches, so there will not be available or visible. Come down here and you change from swatches to color table,.ACT, which is Adobe color table and they will show up here. You then click and load. You scroll down here and you'll see moonlight color table, but we have to import another one. Click on the button again. Click on ''Import Swatches''. It will open the exact window where you saved your files or where you picked your last file, but you still have to change the file format from searches to color table. Then you find your second color table, you double-click on it and it will be loaded as well. Here we go. You have Moonlight Color Table 1 and Moonlight Color Table 2. You can now start to place them on your mood board. Basically you create one layer, name it Color 1, and then you draw a shape. Hold on ''Shift'' for a perfect shape. Click on the color you want from the color table, and then copy this layer and then select the second color, and then copy that layer a third time and then click on the third color, and then label these layers Colors 1, 2, 3. Then I like to group these. Just to save time, we will copy Moonlight 1, and we will move Moonlight 2 away, and then we'll start to change the colors and it will start with Moonlight 2 Color 1, Moonlight 2 Color 2, and then Moonlight 3 Color 3. See we have all the colors and we have access to the names of these colors like hex values of these colors because once you click here, you get all these different values that you can use later on. We don't even have to label them here because once we click and we get the color picker, we can immediately get the color we want. Remember they're also saved in the color tables. We didn't have to worry about that. Don't forget to save your file. The second option is using a service like Coolors. It's spelled C-O-O-L-O-R-S. This one is free to use, which is great. Basically type coolors.co and this is where we land. You can have a free account and you can sign up. But for this demonstration, I'm not going to login. We can just start with a generator now. It just basically generates different palettes for you or different colors that work well together. Press the ''Space Bar'' and it keeps switching them out. If you find a color that you like, you can lock it. Let's say I liked the plum, I'm going to lock it down, and then I press the space bar and then it keeps generating colors that will work well with plum. Yeah, I love this rich black for graph. You can look down the colors you want and keep switching them out, you can look at the shades and the tints, you can check the contrast of the color, and you can copy the hex code and you can enter that in Photoshop or in a website builder or whatever you're using, export the file as any of these file formats. You can export it as a URL. You can export it as an image or a PDF. Let's save this as an image and you can name it whatever you want. You can also create a color palette from a photograph. You can upload a photograph here, or you can use a URL to that particular photograph, or you can use your camera, or you can just pick one of the stock photographs provided by coolors.co. That's basically it with Coolors. You can interact with the website and see how it works for you and you can export your own different colors you would want to have in the photograph. This can inform the outfits you choose. They can inform the background you choose, the makeup, and all the different things that you want to work with. That's coolors.co. Our next step is to get inspiration from Pinterest. Download image. Now we're going to import all the other elements in the mood board that we haven't already. Remember we already started with the color palettes that we extracted from the film stills. That's what we have here, which is Moonlight 1 and Moonlight 2, and then we proceed by importing the other color palette which we got from Coolors. You just import the photograph and you place it where you want. In this case, I prefer to have mine here. It makes more sense to me to have the colors on one side and all the other elements taking up different space. We'll now import the photographs. I already did this to save time. You import them into Photoshop and then you place them anywhere that makes sense to you or anyway you want. They're not attached. I felt placing some of them on top of each other would bring a dynamic aspect to this mood board that I like. Once you're done importing the photographs, it helps to have a bit of texts, and in this case I just named it Jane Doe portrait shoot. But of course, this would be the name of the person you're going to photograph or the name of the editorial or shoot, and I believe having a name or title for the project guides even more when you're working. That's how I finished mood board. I hope you are able to follow along up to this point. Don't forget to save. Here are my tips for you. Do your research and prepare before the actual work begins. That's the whole point behind pre-production. Allow yourself to experiment with different colors, materials, and styles. Do it differently from how you believe it should be done. Remember to be patient with yourself. Creativity is the process and not the result. To recap, we learned how to create mood boards and storyboards. Just like that, you have learned how to create mood boards and storyboards. Wasn't that fun? I can't wait to see what you'll created. See you in our final video where I'll tell you how you can share your boards with me and the rest of your classmates. [MUSIC] 6. Conclusion: Congratulations, I'm so happy to tell you that you have made it to the final video of this class. I hope you are able to develop your own pre-production process. But if you have any questions, feel free to write them down in the discussion section below, or reach out to me directly through one of my social media accounts. Feel free to tag me on Instagram, @chrisdennisrosenberg or use the #chrisdennisrosenbergxskillshare. If ever you create work inspired by something from this class, I would love to see what you create. Here are my tips for you. Remember to be respectful of other people's work. Copying is not the same thing as being inspired. What you create should be your unique take in your own voice about a shared topic or social issue. Be patient with yourself. The people whose work you admire didn't just become who they are now, there are so many back stories to every success story, and sometimes they look just like yours, difficult and slow but rewarding in the end. Prioritize your health and well-being above any perceived success or failure on and offline. Making use of something should not mean exploitation, create responsibly. Thank you so much for your patience and for taking the time to complete this class. I'm looking forward to seeing how you develop your photography. Good luck on your journey. Bye.