As I am on leave because of my new son, I’ve been able to go through my bookshelf and look through some photography books that I haven’t flipped through in literally, decades.
So, I’m going to do a book review so that some of the SRK photographers can learn a little. If anyone has any questions, or if you learned from this post, post up and let me know.
The book review is on Outdoor Portraiture: Problems of Face and Figure In Natural Environment by William Mortensen, published in 1940.
First of all, there is a lot of the book that is completely out of date, because it assumes that you are going to be using black and white 8x10 view camera, but recommends what he calls a black and white 35mm “miniature” camera. He also gives very detailed instuctions on how to build a collapsable reflector out of four pieces of wood, a pair of hinges and some white cloth. This piece of equipment is key to everything that follows, but suffice to say that a few bucks spent on a sunshade is a much better solution than his diy plans.
Also, since it was written in the forties, by a guy in his forties, there are a few different nuggets of bigoted and arrogant statements like these beauties:
It is clear that he believes that his way is the “One True Way” to do photography. Once you get around his ego and the outdated equipment, the book becomes half as long, and is goes into depth on how to solve one basic problem. How to deal with images that have highlights or shadows that are outside the dynamic range of the camera. This concept, and the method (and he only has one method) to solve it are as relevant today as they were back then.
So, I shot a few example photos similar to the ones that are in the book, because I don’t have access to a scanner at the moment.
So the basic presentation goes like this (I’m paraphrasing):
You are going to shoot a picture like this because you are stupid.
http://rei.bustkaratedojo.net/post/IMG_1308.jpg
You should have done something like this.
http://rei.bustkaratedojo.net/post/IMG_1307.jpg
I’m going to show you the mistakes you made.
So he goes on to explain that there are five types of images. Type A, B, C, D, and E. It starts with type A being a photo with no blown out highlights or shadows and the image gets more contrast until it reaches type E, which is an image with underexposed shadows and overexposed highlights. Here are some examples. (Again, I shot these this afternoon because I don’t have a scanner).
Type A
http://rei.bustkaratedojo.net/post/IMG_1315.jpg
Type C
http://rei.bustkaratedojo.net/post/IMG_1309.jpg
Type E
http://rei.bustkaratedojo.net/post/IMG_1319.jpg
Then, he basically goes through how to identify what lighting conditions that you have (A, B, C, D, or E), and shows you how to use a reflector to fill in the shadows with light so that you can change every image into a Type A image.
The beautiful part is that you don’t have to mess with his reflector diagrams in today’s day and age. You can just identify the ambient lighting conditions and then throw up your sunshade in different places until you have a Type A image. Verify that you did it right with your chimp screen and call it a day. Essentially, this is his method, but it is much easier and quickly done with any digital camera.
