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Photo Book Reviews

Beyond Portraiture: Creative People Photography by Bryan Peterson If you want to learn how to take pictures of people, or build on your already-extant knowledge, then Bryan Peterson’s Beyond Portraiture: Creative People Photography is an excellent place to start. Article rating: 8.67

© 2007 Bryan Peterson

This lavish guidebook furnishes an abundance of useful, nuts-and-bolts advice for the artistically sensitive amateur portrait photographer, illustrated with stunning color photographs on nearly every page.

© 2007 Bryan Peterson

Beyond Portraiture is helpfully organized into following chapters: “Understanding People,” “Working with People,” “Light,” “Composing Powerful Portraits,” and “Photo-Editing Techniques,” with appendixes on “Selling Your Photos as Stock” and “Workflow.”

In “Understanding People,” Peterson explains how you can overcome the awkwardness inherent in getting strangers to pose for your camera. This is a particularly hard step for many beginning photographers. Even if you are confident behind the camera, it is not easy to make others feel comfortable in front of it. Peterson shows how you can break through the inevitable barriers to develop a rapport with your portrait subject and elicit the most natural expressions and gestures for a truly authentic photograph. You have to think, too, about the clothing your subject is wearing, the environment she is in, and so on: take these into account for a more memorable portrait. And for Pete’s sake, don’t forget to have your subject sign a model release form - absolutely each and every time - or you could have legal problems down the road.

Peterson gets down to specifics in “Working with People,” tapping his considerable professional experience to advise the readers on such issues as whether to go for a posed or candid shot; how to use white balance on your digital camera; how to photograph people in foreign countries; how to capture people at work or at play; how to hire models; and so forth. In the next chapter, Peterson gives us more technical know-how about light: how to use frontlight, sidelight, backlight, dappled light and diffused light. Pointer: buy a reflector so you can divert sunlight into your subject’s face if she’s wearing a hat.

The art of composition is explored in “Composing Powerful Portraits,” in which Peterson shows the reader some of his own powerful portraits and explains how he did it. Going beyond the famous “rule of thirds,” Peterson offers instruction on filling the frame, using creative points of view, “working your subject,” using scale and adjusting shutter speed and aperture for the best effects. Finally, Peterson gives a valuable tour of basic to advanced-amateur photo-editing techniques in the last chapter. You can learn how to tweak colors, eliminate wrinkles, add drama to your photo, transplant your subject to another setting, and add atmosphere and style to your creations using Photoshop.

Bryan Peterson seems an ideal person to offer guidance to a beginning portrait photographer. His own portraits are powerful and expressive, covering a vast range of humanity, in myriad nations and settings. His work is a pleasure to look at, and enlightening as well, because by studying these photos - particularly in the context of Peterson’s accompanying advice - anyone interested in photographing people can improve her skills. Peterson is a fine teacher, communicating with a lucid, friendly, down-to-earth voice that everyone will find helpful.

Bryan Peterson is also the best-selling author of Understanding Exposure, Learning to See Creatively, and Understanding Digital Photography. His photographic work includes industry, landscape, and corporate photos. Peterson is the founder of the online photography school The Picture Perfect School of Photography (www.ppsop.com), an internationally known instructor, and a contributing editor at Popular Photography Magazine.

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Very interesting - Posted by: Sue Neumann Jan 2, 2009 @ 7:33 AM EST

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