Yousof Karsh

one of the most famous and accomplished portrait photographers of all time.
He grew up during theArmenian Genocide
Karsh was a master of studio lights. One of Karsh's distinctive practices was lighting the subject's hands separately. He photographed many of the great and celebrated personalities of his generation. Throughout most of his career he used the 8×10 bellows Calumet (1997.0319) camera, made circa 1940 in Chicago.
Karsh had a gift for capturing the essence of his subject in the instant of his portrait. As Karsh wrote of his own work in Karsh Portfolio in 1967, "Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can. The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world. In that fleeting interval of opportunity the photographer must act or lose his prize."

portraits

A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant.
A portrait often shows a person looking directly at the painter or photographer, in order to most successfully engage the subject with the viewer.

Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002)

Yousuf Karsh is considered one of the most famous portrait photographers of all time. The Canadian photographer of Armenian descent is best known for his portrait work of dignitaries, politicians and celebrities. Some of his most famous subjects include:

• Muhammad Ali
• Humphrey Bogart
• Fidel Castro
• Albert Einstein
• Dwight Eisenhower
• Robert Frost
• Clark Gable
• Ernest Hemingway
• Audrey Hepburn
• Pope John Paul II
• Helen Keller
• Grace Kelly
• Jacqueline Kennedy
• John F. Kennedy
• Laurence Olivier

Diane Arbus (1923-1971)

Documenting society's rejects was a passion of American photographer Diane Arbus. She is best known for her portraits of individuals, who lived on the fringes of society, including dwarfs, giants, prostitutes and transvestites. Arbus also won accolades for capturing ordinary people in extraordinary poses and settings. To this day, historians credit Arbus for pushing the boundaries of "tasteful" portrait photography.

Elsa Dorfman

American portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman possesses a skill invaluable to her profession-she can connect with a subject in record time. Dorfman stands out in the world of portrait photography because she uses a 20 by 24-inch Polaroid camera, rather than a sophisticated digital device. Film costs about $50 per exposure, so she limits herself to two exposures per subject. This means that Dorfman must work twice as hard to capture the essence of a subject's expression. Dorfman's artistic success as a portrait photographer has been displayed in major museums around the world.

Portrait Lighting for photography

The three pictures above and beside this, illustrate a couple of interesting details…  First, take a look and see how the length of the nose shadow is shortened as the light source seems to wrap around the subject as it gets closer.  Yes, I had to adjust the light intensity for this illustration, because as the light got closer, it also became brighter.
Second…  Notice how the background appears to be darker as the light got to be closer.  The reason for this all explained in the “Inverse Square Law”.  As the light got closer it became proportionately farther away from the background.

Vocab

Kalliprint

Kallitype printing follows similar procedures and uses many of the same chemicals as Platinum and Palladium Printing. Kallitype is a great process for students and beginners who want to practice their handcoating and printing techniques before moving up to Platinum or Palladium printing. Contains: 25 ml - Silver Nitrate 10% Solution 25 ml - Ferric Oxalate 20% Solution 25 ml - Ammonium Dichromate contrast booster 250 g - EDTA Clearing Agent 250 g - Sodium Thiosulfate fixer 1 Quart - Black tone developer Droppers For Bottles Instructions Van Dyke Photography What I am going to talk about right now is this tool, this machine that is used to make Polaroid transfers. Now, Polaroid transfer is technically an image that you take and you put onto this Polaroid film. You can actually use Fuji film. Fuji film makes a nice instant pack film now too. You can use either or. They are both just as good as each other. Kind of expensive though. This film roughly costs about $25 a box for 20 sheets. So this process is not one of the cheaper processes. But definitely one of the most fun processes you could possibly do. The idea behind this process and this machine is that essentially you can have a flat color image. You could even have a color digital image that if you make a print out you could put flat on this piece of glass right here. You close this down and in here is where your film goes. This film is very fragile. There is no film in here right now but if there was the pack goes right in like this. Close it, shut it Cyanotype Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that gives a cyan-blue print. The process was popular in engineering circles well into the 20th century. The simple and low-cost process enabled them to produce large-scale copies of their work, referred to as blueprints. Two chemicals are used in the process: Ammonium iron(III) citrate Potassium ferricyanide Pinhole Camera A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture — effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. The human eye in bright light acts similarly, as do cameras using small apertures. Up to a certain point, the smaller the hole, the sharper the image, but the dimmer the projected image. Optimally, the size of the aperture should be 1/100 or less of the distance between it and the projected image. A pinhole camera's shutter is usually manually operated because of the lengthy exposure times, and consists of a flap of some light-proof material to cover and uncover the pinhole. Typical exposures range from 5 seconds to hours and sometimes days. A common use of the pinhole camera is to capture the movement of the sun over a long period of time. This type of photography is called Solargraphy. The image may be projected onto a translucent screen for real-time viewing (popular for observing solar eclipses; see also camera obscura), or can expose film or a charge coupled device (CCD). Pinhole cameras with CCDs are often used for surveillance because they are difficult to detect. Camera Obscura The camera obscura (Latin; "camera" is a "vaulted chamber/room" + "obscura" means "dark"= "darkened chamber/room") is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with colour and perspective preserved. The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation. Using mirrors, as in the 18th century overhead version (illustrated in the Discovery and Originssection below), it is possible to project a right-side-up image. Another more portable type is a box with an angled mirror projecting onto tracing paper placed on the glass top, the image being upright as viewed from the back. As a pinhole is made smaller, the image gets sharper, but the projected image becomes dimmer. With too small a pinhole the sharpness again becomes worse due to diffraction. Some practical camera obscuras use a lens rather than a pinhole because it allows a larger aperture, giving a usable brightness while maintaining focus. (See pinhole camera for construction information.) Sandy Skoglund Sandy Skoglund (born September 11, 1946) is an American photographer and installation artist.Skoglund creates surrealist images by building elaborate sets or tableaux, furnishing them with carefully selected small children and other objects, a process of which takes her months to complete. Finally, she photographs the set, complete with actors. The works are characterized by an overwhelming amount of one object and either bright, contrasting colors or a monochromatic color scheme.Skoglund studied both art history and studio art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1968. In 1967, she studied art history at the Sorbonne and École du Louvre in Paris,France. After graduating from Smith College, she went to graduate school at the University of Iowa in 1969, where she studied filmmaking, multimedia art, and printmaking. In 1971, she earned her Master of Arts and in 1972 a Master of Fine Arts in painting.In 1972, Skoglund began working as a conceptual artist in New York. She became interested in teaching herself photography to document her artistic endeavors, experimenting with themes of repetition. In 1978, she had produced a series of repetitious food item still life images.One of her most-known sculptures, entitled Radioactive Cats, features green-painted clay cats running amok in a gray kitchen. An older man sits in a chair with his back facing the camera while his elderly wife looks into a refrigerator that is the same color as the walls. Another image, Fox Games has a similar feel to Radioactive Cats and is also widely recognized. A third and final oft-recognized piece by her features numerous fish hovering above people in bed late at night and is called Revenge of the Goldfish. The piece was used as cover art for the Inspiral Carpets album of the same name.Skoglund was an art professor at the University of Hartford between 1973 and 1976. She is currently teaching photography and art installation/multimedia at Rutgers University in New Jersey.Skoglund has recently completed a series titled "True Fiction Two". This recent project is similar to the "True Fiction" series that she began in 1986. This series was not completed due to the discontinuation of materials that Skoglund was using. Kodak canceled the production of the dye that Skoglund was using for her prints. Each image in "True Fiction Two" has been meticulously crafted to assimilate the visual and photographic possibilities now available in digital processes.Her works are held in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Dayton Art Institute.  William Wegman (b. 1943 in Holyoke, Massachusetts) is an artist best known for creating series of compositions involving dogs, primarily his own Weimaraners in various costumes and poses.