2 Portraits

[Boyan Atanaschev]

Foundedin 1942, Portraits, Inc. assists families, corporations, and institutions wishing to honor individual legacies with fine art portraits. The oldest and largest firm of its kind, we have curated a collection of today's foremost portrait artists, the Portraits, Inc. Collection, which represents an extensive range of styles, mediums and price points. We simplify the process and take care of all the details, ensuring a seamless and successful portrait commission experience.

Since 1942, Portraits, Inc., has been privileged to assist our nation's most remarkable families and institutions with commissioning fine art portraits. It would be our pleasure to help create your lasting legacy.

Art, biography, history and identity collide in the fifth season of Portraits, from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Join director Kim Sajet as she chats with curators, historians, and thought leaders about their favorite portraits, and reveals the real people behind the art.

Take a closer look at one of the most imposing, influential, and expensive books published in the United States before the Civil War, Thomas McKenney and James Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of North America. Published between 1837 and 1844, the book features 120 portraits of Indigenous people, mostly tribal leaders visiting Washington, DC, as part of official delegations to the federal government. In this exhibition, you can view the work as it is rarely seen, in its original form of publication: in twenty fascicles, large pamphlets intended to be dismantled and reassembled into more permanent bindings by their purchasers. While the fascicles were produced and distributed in a time of great upheaval, dispossession, and conflict for Indigenous peoples in the United States, many of the images they contain have remained a source of intertribal solidarity and pride.

The McGill/McHale Trio, an international all-star ensemble of flute, clarinet, and piano, makes its recording debut with Portraits, featuring world-premiere recordings of new compositions and arrangements for this captivating combination of instruments.

The sense of a place is intimately connected to its rhythms, the dynamic patterns that transport us toward imaginings of physical sensation and natural environment. The McGill/McHale Trio has selected music by living composers who inspire the listener to experience a series of multi-sensory portraits, each invoking a compelling sense of place. Poetic references and sonic imagery in each of these works impel us to engage fully with the music, to hear with all our senses.

Techno-Parade opens with driving repetitions and virtuosic riffs conveying the relentless excitement of techno music. Yet this is an ironic take on the electronic music genre. Unpredictably shifting meters, occasionally settling into an uneven if temporarily constant feeling of 7/4, are in alternation with passages lacking the comfort of any obvious downbeat. In the middle of the piece there is a percussion break, where the pianist uses a wire brush and places sheets of paper directly on top of the piano strings.

How do you shoot amazing Golden Hour portraits on the beach with no on camera or off-camera flash? Golden Hour is that pocket of time just after sunrise but most popular about an hour before sunset. Sunset photography sessions are the most highly sought after portraits because the Golden Hour is the most optimal time to create glowing, magical portraits that will create the soft portraits everyone is in love with.

Before I start my post about how to create sun-kissed portraits using natural light only, I wanted to add a short personal story, because this blog is a mix of personal and work experiences that have set my career on this path and brought me where I am today.

As far as depth of field, before the sunset when I prefer not to use a light, I keep my aperture settings between f1.8 and 2.0. My ISO stays at 100 or as low as possible. I love the softness of the light, the purposeful flares coming through the lens and the even skin tones that are achieved with these settings.

One of the problematic areas of the exhibition was the wall text, which included scant narrative of the injuries sustained or how these soldiers came to know the president. I heard several museum visitors ask the docents about various individuals shown. Asking feels a bit intrusive. One must read the catalogue to get the full stories, all of which are written by Bush. I felt uncomfortable with the skeletal bluntness of the wall texts; they blurred together, becoming almost interchangeable. The sheer quantity of numbers in the exhibition, though meant to highlight the specificity of the subjects, also muddies the experience of looking. The emphasis on percentages and statistics reaches its zenith in the room with the interactive system. I scored terribly on the quiz on veterans, and I live with one.

The paintings themselves are quite expressive, if somewhat inconsistent, likely owing to the time Bush spent on them. Bush paints at an astonishingly fast clip, and some portraits are more detailed than others. His expressionistic style also works well given the short window of time allotted to the series. The brushwork is loose and the paintings full of rich impasto, but the facial expressions are clear. Though he has overworked a few faces, Bush has nonetheless rendered the majority with fluidity and ease. For example, the lighting in the portrait of Sergeant Bryce Franklin Cole is striking in its clarity and plays well with the impasto on the canvas. Others, such as the portrait of Sergeant Daniel Casara, show a strong use of color modeling in the facial contours as well as in the backdrop.

In this case, the photograph represents a single moment from a time-based work. In his anecdote on Zimmerman in the catalogue, Bush reveals that she was diagnosed with PTS and depression following her deployment. She comes across as much more confident in the video than in her portrait, which shows her as tough but distant, and perhaps not fully self-assured. The portrait focuses on the contrasts between the brightness and waviness of her hair and the paleness of her skin and leanness of her cheeks. Her injury is an invisible one.

Melissa Warak is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at El Paso. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the intersections of music, sound, and art after the 1950s.

Mark Seliger (b. 1959, Amarillo, TX) (he/him) is an American photographer known for his portraits of celebrities and public figures, including Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Mick Jagger. Seliger has created covers for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, GQ, and Elle, among others. His work is held in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the National Portrait Gallery in London; and now the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

A candid portrait is one where the subject is unaware that a photo has been taken. The idea is to capture people acting naturally. They should be unaware they are being photographed, as their behavior can change once they become aware of the camera.

Here are a few techniques that can help you create candid portraits while taking photos while traveling. For me travel is the best way to make candid portraits as local people add character and interest to your photos.

Use a small camera. The bigger your camera and lens, the more likely you are to be noticed by people. There is something about smaller cameras (like mirrorless cameras or compacts) that are less threatening. A friend of mine who is a model told me that she is more relaxed when the photographer uses a small camera. If an experienced model feels this way, then how will ordinary people feel? You can also consider using a smartphone.

Make photos at cultural celebrations. People expect to be photographed at events like this. For example, I made the photo below at carnival in Cadiz, Spain. All I had to do was stand nearby in the crowd and make photos of the performers.

The most useful tip here is to use a small camera (and lens). The lighter your setup the easier it is to carry it around with you all day. The second is to have a friendly demeanour, and to be open to talking to local people. The rest is just technique. Feel free to start with a wide-angle lens, look for interesting settings and photograph people walking through them. Cultural celebrations of any kind are also a great opportunity to make candid portraits.

This widespread tradition in Italy and Northern Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries will be explored through approximately 60 double-sided and covered portraits from The Met collection and other American and European institutions, including the reunion of several portraits and their covers that had been split and made part of separate collections. Painted by artists such as Hans Memling, Lucas Cranach, Lorenzo Lotto, and Titian, the works range from portraits intended as portable propaganda to those designed to conceal a lover's identity. These varied three-dimensional, hand-held ensembles shed significant light upon the intimate and personal nature of portraits designed as interactive objects.

Although depth of field is often discussed in portrait photography, the conversation tends to center around background bokeh. In this article and the accompanying video, however, I would like to address depth of field as it relates to the face itself and attempt to answer the question as to which aperture is best for photographing faces.

The first distinction I like to make when choosing an aperture is whether I am taking headshots or portraits. For clarification, I consider a headshot as head and shoulders only, while a portrait is anything with a looser crop. I also distinguish headshots and portraits in my studio by the lighting I use and poses employed. My headshots tend towards simple and clean lighting, while my portrait work can be much more dramatic and, for lack of a better word, artistic.

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