Contemporary Portraiture & Leading Lines

Tog College on Tuesday was great. We studied some famous contemporary portraiture artists, talked about the lighting for each image we looked at. We also went through a load of landscape and street photography too whilst discussing vanishing points and leading lines, which coincided with some of my "cool lines" pictures from Portsmouth (see road trip post) Thought I'd list some of the ones that came up, I am yet to decide on my favourite and am sure I will find others too.

Sally Mann
Mario Testino
Annie Leibovitz
Ansel Adams
Fay Godwin
Andreas Gursky
Andre Kertesz

We were asked to have a walk around the college to experiment a bit, so although they're not the most interesting of shots, I thought I would share with you the pictures I took on tuesday evening. My motorway one from last week is my favourite though, I am going to try and get some more shots in this weekend too.

On another note, I ordered a Canon Speedlite 430EX II and it arrived today! i am very excited about this and looking forward to experimenting a lot more with light when I am doing portraiture at home etc. I am going to chat more to my Tutor next week about how to use it but I had a little play this evening and bounced the flash off the ceiling to see what the false "natural light effect" looked like and I was not disappointed! Bearing in mind it is dark already outside so the light indoors is naff! This is my husband... and his new toy... yes it is a washing line, but before you question his masculinity, it's a camping washing line to hang our wetsuits on next year on our surfing holidays!

I literally plugged it onto my camera and took a photograph there and then so if you can ignore the actual image itself and think about the lighting, just see how the light mimics daylight... cool eh!