The Portrait Masters accreditation | Photo competition | Rotterdam portrait studio

The 2020 Portrait Masters Awards & Accreditation by Sue Bryce

It is super hard to judge your own work. That’s why I decided to enter the Portrait Master competition with 3 of my photos, just to see what would happen. Every photo gets judged by a panel of 5 international award winning photographers, who have made a name in the portrait business. I am super proud to announce to you all that all 3 pictures I have sent in, received bronze score! Yay!

I decided that the best way I could test myself, was by choosing 3 completely different types of lighting. So I went for:

Natural light
Artificial light
Creative artificial light

Shot with natural light

When there’s sunlight, there is a beautiful lightsource available. The trick is knowing how to use that lightsource to make your subject look their absolute best. Placing someone in harsh sunlight will result in harsh shadows and bright highlights. But controlling the natural light by diffusing it, bouncing it around and flagging certain areas I created beautiful flattering light. Samantha Paap looks gorgeous in this light!

While natural light can look stellar, it doesn’t have the flexibility and constancy of strobe lighting. It could be an overcast, cloudy day with soft light, a bright sunny day with super harsh light, or maybe a combination of the two: the situation where it can go from quite dark to bright and back within 10 seconds. Watching the light constantly and adjusting to the changes can be challenging. And the worst thing that could happen when you’re solely a natural light photographer: the sun could set. You can’t do anything about that, unfortunately.

Except…

Using artificial lighting.

Shot with artificial light

A major advantage of shooting with artificial light is that you can tweak the light to look exactly how you want the light to look. For example, using multiple lights is no problem with studio lighting. One can also easily change the color of one light by using color gels: see-through colored candy-wrapper like sheets of plastic with a little more heat protection than normal candy-wrapper plastic. This photograph is shot on a gray backdrop, but using this technique the colors look more comprehensive. Michantely de Jong takes all the attention here, which was exactly the plan.

Another major advantage is that if you don’t like the way the light looks, you can of course simply change the direction by moving the light or modifying it, to look softer or harder.

The possibilities are endless, you can take it from natural-light looking all the way to super creative! Which brings us to the next one.

Shot with creative artificial light

Remember what I said about gels? Taking this to a whole new level is when you’re using gels for every light you have. To make the most of the colors while I planned ahead, I looked at the color wheel for inspiration. Color theory is super useful, you can find which colors go together really well, or which combinations you should stay away from. A great tool is to use the online tool from Adobe, where you can choose different kind of color harmonies to see which colors go together in a specific color scheme.

I chose these two colors because they go well together, almost complimentary. To add to the feel, we matched the top and lips with the red light. Sophie Bijkerk looks absolutely stellar!

I have learnt this specific creative lighting technique in Geneva, where I went to assist Lindsay Adler last December.

So, I am extremely proud to have 3 out of 3 photographs in this Portrait Masters Awards & Accreditation scored with Bronze! I would like to thank Sue Bryce for the organization of this competition, and Samantha, Michantely and Sophie of course.