# GAME-CHANGING Portrait Tips from a true MASTER

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Jamie Windsor
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqJQnzHL2rM
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/43980

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

you know when you just moved your hair like that keep your hand there that's nice that's good keep that position that's great that's fantastic anyone can take a portrait well anyone with a camera and a basic knowledge of Photography you set up some soft light you blur the background you pick a flattering focal length you pose your subject and a perfectly serviceable portrait but here's the thing technique isn't what makes a great portrait take ysf K's legendary portrait of Winston Churchill for example why is this portrait iconic is it because the background is blurred lighting is soft and flattering is it because Churchill's face pops from the background I mean these things are important and they make it technically solid but it's not why it's great because of the thing that is captured in the shot you see when this portrait was taken Churchill had just finished delivering a powerful speech and he was Gruff and defiant and he refused to put out his cigar for the photo and Kos under pressure with Just 2 minutes to get the shot did something pretty bold he walked up to his subject and plucked the cigar right out of Churchill's mouth Churchill was not very happy about this and he fixed the photographer with a Stern glare but that was exactly the look of sheer unfiltered Defiance that encapsulated Churchill's image as an unshakable wartime leader and that was the moment that ksh decided to capture pure Churchill and that is what makes this portrait Unforgettable so was this just luck was it a one-off moment of Brilliance probably not when you consider K's incredible body of work and this is because some photographers have a rare ability to capture portraits that really stick with you photos that end up being used on book covers being hung in the National Portrait Gallery or win well press photo Awards so how do you learn to take portraits like this well a good start would be asking someone who actually does so I interviewed renowned portrait photographer Harry bordon if you don't recognize the name the chances are you'll at least recognize some of his work he's a two-time worldpress photo Award winner he has over a 100 portraits in the National Portrait Gallery collection a place where he's had a solo exhibition before he was made an honorary fellow of the royal photographic Society his work has graced the pages of Vogue of the New Yorker of Time Magazine and many others and on a side note Harry's also recently started a rather brilliant YouTube channel that he runs with his son Fred and on that he shares stories and insights from his decades behind the lens photographing celebrities icons other people if you're even remotely interested in photography it is really worth subscribing to because while there are plenty of great YouTube photography channels out there few YouTubers come with credentials like this guy Harry bordon is a wealth of experience and knowledge so I wanted to see whatever I could learn from him so we sat down and I talked with him to see if I could gain any insight into what it really takes to capture a portrait that lingers in your mind long after you've looked away I'll put the full interview up on my YouTube channel as a separate video shortly but here is an edited version that I think best showcases the most educational points from my chat with him so you've had and still very much do have a very successful photographic career you've got two well press photo Awards you've had a solo exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery can you tell us a bit about how you got to the position where you are now I never really let photography become a chore and so initially I was working for trade magazines you know anyone who would pay me because I came to London with nothing as a byproduct of doing thousands of jobs for them I might get the opportunity to photograph someone famous that I could put into my portfolio and then I could go and see the independent uh on Sunday review because the Sunday Times and the obser Ser wouldn't give you any jobs I carried on working for all anyone who would pay me uh but by the time I had a commission say from The New Yorker I was really battle hardened you know I really kind of was confident uh in my kind of grasp of the medium I was really able to kind of express myself and get something interesting there isn't one sort of defining thing there isn't a sort of strategy really all I all I've ever tried to do is um take uh get some

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

pictures that make the picture editors look good and then it's a virtuous cycle they'll get you more that'll get you more commissions and you then you make them look even better the simp the best way to improve as a photographer is to take more pictures so was photographing celebrities always a goal of yours I'm not uh enamored uh with the world of celebrity particularly certainly I'm PR and you know I kind of have I'm sort of inquisitive uh By Nature and certainly people if you define celebrities as people who've done something noteworthy of Interest then you know they're inherently interesting um I would definitely say that celebrities uh or I. E anyone that you get to photograph is a good barometer of where you are in terms of your uh portrait photography and by this stage I'd sort of would regard myself as a portrait photographer I think everyone is sort of fascinating and so I purely as a mechanism by which I could sort of Judge my uh the how people valued my photography uh photographing celebrities is this useful mechanism for that plus of course as since 1988 the default is you own the copyright of the pictures and so therefore if you photog a picture of um Robin Williams or whoever then uh there's a chance as with Robin Williams actually it's a good example that 20 years later the picture could get used on the cover of his autobiography after he's died it makes sense to photograph celebrities because more people will see your pictures and more people will make assumptions about you as a photographer and they're all good you seem to have a real ability to take those portraits that end up getting picked for things like the covers of books or they end up on permanent display at the National Portrait Gallery so what do you consider to be the qualities that make up a great portrait what is it that makes an image unique and memorable for you I think for me it's encapsulated in the phrase that a portrait is a record of the relationship you have with the person on the day and so it's about connect connection and there can be kind of a complete lack of connection like I photographed Terrence conran a few times and you know he was quite a sort of difficult and uh kind of hostile presence and one of the first pictures I took I remember he was puffing on a cigar and I put him in front of this abstract painting and it I think it got into the equivalent of the Taylor wesing the National Portrait Gallery competition was one of my first back in about 91 and so you can have no or and that's a sort of connection in itself a complete bullishness uh and hostility to the photographer which you can work with but by and large it's that connected that feeling of being close to someone and it's a connection Through The Eyes you know and so for me the eyes are really key to a portrait often the times that it's failed I remember doing Adrien Brody I still got good pictures but I found out that he was really into Hip Hop uh which he wouldn't think but he's really into rap and stuff like that and um and I found myself I just found out that fact and I found myself bringing that up and I and it just made a completely aats fake kind of conversation that led nowhere because it wasn't me being me it was me sort of researching the subject and sort of feeding him what I thought he'd want to talk about a lot of your portraits are environmental the spaces that you pick and how you get your subject to interact with those spaces I find very interesting your shot of Tony Blair that sticks out particularly in my mind there's something slightly surreal about it about that location with the doorway and the anachronistic telephone and the hose what is it that you look for when you're looking for a space to take a photograph of someone in do you have preconceived ideas of what you want before the shoot or do you just go with what you find on the day it's completely serendipitous I don't like to have any preconceived ideas it's like jazz I mean you basically just turn up and that Tony Blair shoot was like that I was able to persuade um aliser Campbell that we should do it outside it was at the weekend and he was being interviewed by Kamal Ahmed and Andrew ronley for the Observer and so I took some pictures of him being interviewed and then I had a Wanderer around number 10 and the garden is kind of weird it's like this little way Oasis

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

of calm and so on and then I happened upon that door and I think it's an element of my photography which isn't really about portraits um you know before I had the confidence to sort of take portraits of people which I find much more rewarding um I would obviously take pictures of things and what I would look for is a weird atmosphere uh a sort of graphic sort of tension and something that's sort of indescribable um and as I've got older my sensitivity to these uh these places has become more acute so I look for an interesting space a space that sort of intrigues me on a very intuitive level not I can't sort of write down a bullet point list of things that I look for I just sort of trust my instincts and it can be some weird light that's reflecting off a building and then coming back in and kind of creating this strange light I mean there's a picture I took of my mom with uh you know before she died and she's just sitting on the bench and the light there's no light on her and the lights reflect the sun is like is going hard onto a greenhouse and it's coming back onto her and she's sitting next to the dog on this bench so I just look for strangeness and weirdness and then I pop someone into that location and record the relationship that we have on the day so I noticed that props uh appear quite regularly in your portraits and there something I'd like to ask about because I particularly like that one of Lena Dunham sat on the Pink Flamingos again because I think it just has that slight edge of surreality for me how much do you plan when bringing props to a shoot is it something you put a lot of thought into do you choreograph it a lot I'm not that guy you know I'm not David lash rapel I tend to kind of get shoehorned into doing that and the guardian basically she was writing a piece I think it was about love Island the guardian said can you pick up a sunbed uh and we can shoot her against the suned maybe you know it's completely ridiculous and badly organized and I got to Wales in the end sort of just before it was about to get dark so it was really by the skin of my teeth but it also meant that the light was good but I went into you know Aldi and I saw the Pink Flamingos you know whenever I have been pressured into bringing along props and everything it has actually worked out quite well sometimes it can take you to good places or maybe I'm just remembering the times it's worked well so for instance I was photographing Paul Merton you know from have I got news for you and My Assistant gave me these wax lips and we tried to get Ronnie Corbit uh to wear them when I was photographing him and he was sort of very serious about his comedy and he wouldn't do it and so they were just in the car so I brought them along and then Paul Merton didn't take himself quite so seriously and wore the lips and they worked well so with Lena Dunham I loved her uh I loved her since Tiny Furniture so it was kind of there were no boundaries she's not a boundaries sort of person and you go straight in deep you know and she's wonderful to work with because she was just really happy to go there you know and so that the other pictures were interesting as well you know and I love the fact that she's so comfortable in her body you know and could just inhabit role do you have any go-to phrases that you use uh to get people to give you that right facial expression or the right demeanor do you have any specific things that you like always ask people to do yeah it's weird it as you were saying that I was thinking no that's just that's the death of spontaneity and then I thought well actually what I tend to say and it I practically say on every shoot is absence of thought so that's my thing absence of thought because I think sometimes it's nice to see someone in Repose and uh so for instance Lorraine Kelly who I just photographed you know she's all twinkly and smiley and everything and as soon as you get her and you say to her absence of thought and everything just drops slightly and you get to look you get to scrutinize her in a way that you don't nor see when she's presenting the bre breakfast show but I tend to kind of just ensure that I have an authentic human exchange at the beginning of many shoots I get you know quite often people say I really don't enjoy being photographed and at the end they go oh that wasn't so bad I actually quite enjoyed that you know and that's because it's sort of not an empty exercise in me stamping people with a treatment or technique it's just I'm sufficiently in control of

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

the medium that it's about me the per one person meeting another person do you have any particular favorite focal length that you like to use uh what are your thoughts on using different focal length support traits what what's your go-to normally I think sometime in the past I noticed that all the pictures that I admired that I aspired to take are sort of Tak on basically a standard lens and mostly with daylight I mean it sounds banal saying it sounds kind of absurd um and sort of bombastic sort of saying that all pictures are taken on the standard lens but that's what your eye sees uh and then it becomes less photographic um I think it was kti breaston sort of saw your the camera as a notepad so I tend to now sort of see the pictures and then basically the last thing I do is bring the camera up and just I try not to over uh compose the picture or try and make aesthetic judgments looking through the viewfinder really the definition of someone whose work is recognizable that they have a unique visual fingerprint is a consistency of approach and so it's about like your video about setting parameters you know if I I don't know if it's that or the fact that I started with a camera with a 50 mm lens and I had it for a long time pictures that are taken on Long lenses look like photographs taken with long lenses and similarly wide lenses look like they look like photographs taken with wide lenses but if you think about a PO a picture that's taken that closely has the same sort of perspective as your eye that's always what you see usually see in good paintings or anything uh that is kind of capturing the way that we as human beings sort of see the world so I would strongly advise is if anyone starting photography to just start with a single fixed lens and stick with that and get used to actually seeing pictures and then what can happen over time is you develop a unique visual fingerprint because all the pictures in your portfolio really should be the same picture the same sort of uh obsessive need to compose things a certain way and that's how you get a consistency of vision become known as a photographer so I know you're a big advocate of using natural light in your portraits uh what are your thoughts on natural light versus artificial light why do you gravitate towards natural light it's almost meditative there's something very profound uh about noticing uh what is already there and it's kind of sort of arrogant or vain glorious to kind of attempt to kind of create what the ma the Majesty of what is already existing I know how to use Flash and I've got lots of tricks you know I know how Nick Knight would have I you know I worked it out and I talked to other photographers and assistants who've worked with great photographers and I have all that in my Armory and I have a trunk load of equipment you know lighting equipment but in the successful shoots it stays in the trunk uh because I drive and then there's some strange light that's just sort of reflecting going through a window and then reflecting on a mirror and then coming back those are sort of wonderful sort of serendipitous things also it's probably slightly borne out of laziness but a laziness that ends up making you more productive because if you're using available light and you've got an hour with baroness sto or whatever and you're in the location you can get a load more scenarios in the within the time constraints that you have so I've heard you mention that your influences are people like Richard avidon uh Dian arus Irving pen these photographers their portfolios are primarily black and white and yet your work seems to be mainly color can you tell me a bit about your choice to shoot color over black and white what do you feel about color and black and white in contemporary photography yeah I sort of think that um I wouldn't want to Hitch my cart to a temporary limitation in the evolution of Photography but having said that I wouldn't pour scorn on black and white uh but I started in black and white I had my own black and white Dart room I love print printing black and white um it just seems slightly perverse now we're shooting on with you know highly evolved digital cameras that record

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

in color to throw that information away and this is a very good reason to do so you know there's an element of sentiment uh sentimentality nostalgia um there's an element of faux seriousness as though this is a news photograph it has to be in black and white and that's because of the context uh in which we viewed these kind of iconic images of the past you know but the girl running the nap Napal girl you know in Vietnam or whatever you know these sort of very profoundly iconic pictures which are part of the landscape of uh the last century you know in terms of recording recent history do you have any shoots that stick out in your mind as being your favorites and why were they your favorites I do have favorites um I at the moment I quite like it's been 25 years and I do quite like the Spice Girls picture it was a time when a lot of things were coming together you know I think I got three pictures in the National Portrait Gallery competition not that picture which is actually in the National Portrait Gallery but I like it on a photographic level as well because it has two different lightings in the same picture so you've got Victoria on one side and she's sort of back lit and then you've got Jerry like the girl in the Pearl Earrings sort of lit by sidelighting sort of um uh Renaissance painting lighting and it's a genuine moment and it's a nice composition and it's also you tend to kind of like pictures but that you appreciate were hard to get so it was difficult wrangling those girls and to get them all together and get a genuine moment and get it on medium format and shoot it in Bangkok and successfully expose it and then for it to get into The National Portrait Gallery and then people talk about the '90s now in a way that they used to talk about the 60s I have a feeling that picture will become you know one of my better known images and I like it it's a genuine moment I remember there was a picture I did of I can't remember who it was a famous playright David hair or somebody like that and uh at the agency I was part of there was a photographer called Tom stodart who's a famous War photographer he's brilliant he's no longer with us and um he basic basically was this Jordie and I remember they were scanning my negatives and this picture was like a head shot and it got caught in the imacon scanner that in the agency and it got ripped in half Tom just said uh it doesn't matter it wasn't a moment and you know what he was right it wasn't a moment and so that was quite an instructive um thing that happened because it made me realize and I did get influenced by the other photographers at the agency were documentary photographers they were into capturing moments they weren't obsessed with technique um it didn't matter if things were out of focus if there was sort of impact I mean obviously things are meant to be sharp where they're but there wasn't this sort of fetishization of photographic technique it was about telling a story and so for me that's another key ingredient whether you've got it's nice to have all that technical stuff but if it's a moment that's the icing on the cake that's what's important now this isn't something that particularly bothers me but it does seem to be a common source of Internet discourse among photographers film versus digital so you've shot a large amount of your work on film and you seem to have sort of moved to digital now what are your thoughts on these mediums uh does it even matter I sold most of my film cameras and uh and was very fiercely against the idea that you would kind of um hitch your cart to something that was assumed to be redundant technology yes I mean people say it does slow you down but you know just slow down you know you shouldn't need to kind of pay3 pound a frame in order to slow yourself down there are an awful lot of photographers for whom the most important thing about their work is that it's shot on film and for me if that's the most important thing about your work then you really need to question what it is you're doing I think at the beginning there was an argument to be made that film was better quality that it had a um something about it uh but now a lot of those cameras you know they have film um uh sort of filters that you can put on without going into all the boring detail you know the gamut is much better I shot my La my last book by but one single dad uh for sentimental reasons and maybe to go back to a place that I

### Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00) [25:00]

felt comfortable and happy when I was shooting on film and to reacquaint myself with my old Hasselblad I shot it on film but it was such an honorous process all the scanning and then cleaning up the files and then getting them the cross curves and the color correction um I don't know if I will go back to film any more so as well as shooting all these celebrities you've also done quite a lot of personal projects you did this Survivor book about survivors of the Holocaust uh you've got your book on divorce that uh looks at divorced couples um you've got your single dad's book uh you've got a load of other projects how does your approach differ when you're photographing someone who isn't famous as opposed to photographing a celebrity it's a chicken and egg situation I mean it it well it's just flipped I mean basically the reason I'm good at photographing um famous people is because I treat them like they're just people we're all just floundering around trying to make sense of the world and so there's no kind of hierarchy in my mind I tend to concentrate on having an authentic human exchange and that can be with somebody who is living in the woods uh for my woodlanders project or you know four hugs wide or somebody who's a great you know Global you know state man or a banker like George Soros I think people who are less famous they have less uh guile um and they can be more nervous but the pictures can have more authenticity and it's easier to get something that has some poignancy and resonates because the other people are Adept the celebrities are Adept at kind of giving you what they want to give you and uh and quite often that's the mark of a good celebrity portrait photographer is that is actually getting under their skin and getting something that's unexpected do you have any views on how advancements in technology have affected photography is this something you've experienced personally certainly in terms of Technology it's massively helped me because I've I'm getting older I'm succumbing to human Frailty you know I had a detached retina and it hasn't affected my practice at all because the photographs are created in your mind and with modern highly evolved digital autofocus Auto exposure cameras you can concentrate on what's important which is sort of recording an intimate relationship you have with a person and you haven't got to kind of be slightly appearing like you're in sincere because you're worrying about f- stops or shutter speeds that's why the ultimate uh example of that is the camera phone so you can just take pictures in a really free way and get technically reasonable results and so photography can be about less uh a kind of process of showing your how technically Adept you are and more about recording uh what matters to you in the world Harry Borden thank you very much you I found Harry really inspiring just to chat to he's so knowledgeable and he's so concise and reasoned in his opinions he really understands what he's doing and he understands why he's doing it um so I wanted to sum up a few key learning points that I've taken from my interview with him firstly probably the most important one the best way to improve as a photographer is to take more pictures so I sound simple but can I emphasize this strongly enough reading books going to galleries watching YouTube videos they're all great things to do but they mean nothing if you don't get your camera and go out there and practice and take photos secondly if you want to be commercially successful it helps to take photographs of things that people want to see so with Harry he shoots celebrities but it could be anything that will be of interest to people make your photography useful thirdly think more about locations when you're taking portraits find a place and then put someone in it don't make it a quick afterthought think about how your subject will interact with the scene look for a place with graphic tension or a kind of weird energy find a place with strange objects or interesting light or a little space that you can fit a person and try to work as intuitively as you can here uh try not to overthink it just kind of feel it four find a phrase that helps people drop their facade so for Harry he says

### Segment 7 (30:00 - 34:00) [30:00]

absence of thought and this is a much better approach than instructing someone to perform a certain facial expression or a pose so I suppose it's a bit like the stanislavski method in acting so you could ask them to recall an emotive memory or something it could be a happy memory a poignant memory whatever you want it to be but if you're making them experience a real emotion the camera will catch it and the audience will feel it five Embrace natural light learn to work with artificial light but only use it when you need to Daylight means you've got less setup so you have more time but it also creates these serendipitous scenes where it bounces and reflects and refracts in ways that you wouldn't have thought of and that can make your shot a lot more interesting six uh so it's best to use a standard focal length unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise so something like 35 mil 50 mil it roughly mirrors how we see um so we tend to focus on the subject rather than the technicalities of the image it removes the sense of looking through a lens and instead creates a more natural immersive experience and that will make it easier for an audience to connect with the subject seven be consistent in your approach and your work will start to become recognizable so when viewers can instantly identify photos as yours it strengthens your artistic voice and that will make you more hirable eight if you're shooting black and white just consider why you're doing that of course there are many great reasons to shoot black and white and there are many great many great black and white photographers out there but I suppose this is more about trying to avoid making artistic decisions based on sentiment or Nostalgia because those factors they're transient nine don't fetishize technique remember you're making an image you're telling a story so a photograph shot on film has no more or less value than a photograph shot digitally it only matters what's in the frame and embrace progress don't cling to redundant processes because you're cynical about the future find a way to bring value into how the world is moving forward one of the things I've really taken away from chatting with Harry wasn't something he specifically said but more from just looking at his work and thinking about his approach and it's that you shouldn't let shoots intimidate you into not being creative so you obviously need to get what the people paying you want but get that out of the way and then you can be creative because it's those creative shots that get remembered it and if it helps just remember that we're all just people as Harry said uh we're all just floundering around trying to find our place in the world so whether that's your friends your family clients CEOs celebrities we're all just the same really so I'd like to thank Harry bordon very much for his input both for his contribution to this video and also just for generally being and Incredibly inspiring person to chat to so go subscribe to his YouTube channel now because you won't regret doing that so just go do it now go do it off you go bye