el toro bumingo: Portraiture Workshop by Pat Dy

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Portraiture Workshop by Pat Dy

Pat Dy is fashion, celebrity and wedding photographer. His works were already featured in magazines like Preview, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Chalk, Metro, Weddings, Good Housekeeping and others. He’s also a Canon Brand Ambassador and one of the Crusaders of Light.

After the workshop conducted by David Guison and Lissa Kahayon, came the Portraiture Workshop by Pat Dy. It was held yesterday at the Cyberzone, SM City North EDSA Annex. This is still part of the Canon PhotoSkwela series of workshops aimed at empowering Canon Users, like me, to do more with our cameras.

He gave some basic tips on how to shoot headshots and portraits and he also answered my question on how to crop pictures for portraits. He demonstrated some of the most basic pose and how to shoot people with different body types.

Here are some of Pat Dy’s tips on how to prepare our subjects (models and clients):

Establish your friendship
Talk to them to get them warmed up to you to get them more relaxed
Cracked a joke and capture that fun, laughing moments.

His camera tips to flatter our subjects:

For tight facial shots, shoot at eye level or a bit higher with the camera pointing down.
For full body shots, shoot at eye level, camera base parallel to the ground
Don’t use the widest angle setting on your lenses. Try to zoom in.
Make them wear tighter clothes

After the lecture and demo part of the workshop, he entertained several questions from the audience. Some of the questions answered by Pat Dy was related to:

Camera settings when doing backlit portraits – Minimum of 50 shutter speed (if using 50 mm lens), 1.8 aperture and 200-400 ISO.
Tips on how to shoot outdoors using natural light – Shoot under the shade.
How to shoot babies and pets – Use high shutter speeds and bells (or other stimuli) to get the attention of the subject.
How to use reflectors when shooting outdoors – Never put it on the bottom because it will reflect the sun’s ray upwards and may cause shadows on the nose, upwards.
Use off-camera flash when shooting outdoors if needed – Use ambient light as much as possible. Pat Dy said that he’s not much of a strobist (using off-camera flash).
Rule of thirds still apply on portraiture
When doing a wedding photography, use spot metering on the gown to capture the details. Prioritize the bride since most of the time, they pay for the shoot
Shoot with friends, with stylist, establish portfolio, submit it to editors and hope for the best.
RAW or JPEG? – Magazine editors prefer RAW but to an ordinary person, he won’t be able to tell the difference of a picture shot in RAW or JPEG

Thank you Pat Dy for the wonderful tips, practical tips on how to shoot portraits. Thank you Canon Philippines for these PhotoSkwela series of workshops and thank you to the sponsors like SanDisk, Black Rapid and Greenwich.