[edible snowman]

i've heard a lot of people touting life drawing over drawing from photos(and i don't disagree), but sometimes life drawing isn't an option. can anyone lay out the deficiencies of using photographs? it would probably be a good thing to keep in mind.

[Duckman2]

Its not as bad if you take your own photos because then you have alot to say about the composition of the work. Many professsional portrait painters use photos when their client is too busy to sit. The its also really tough to get the same impression that the individual takes in. A photo records an instant, a person is more like time-lapse photography with many impressions leading to a complete visualization.

[Lunatique]

Cons:

Photographs tend to flatten and distort the image. The lense doesn't see things the way our eyes do. It focuses differently, and if some part of the photo looks blurry or confusing, you can't just walk up to the subject and investigate the details.

Models will fidget, and if you are using natural light, you have time limitation. Also models can't sit forever.


Pros:

Photos don't move.

Models are alive, and you can interact and direct the model to shift their poses to achieve the look you want. You can also change the lighting on the fly, also the setting, outfits, makeup..etc.

[Mr Crowley]

i think photos aren't good for portraits.
how many times when You take yourself a photo(or somebody else does) you look like yourself on it?
it's very seldom when people agree that they look in this photo like in real.
so,how the artist have to do the good portrait from that photo ?
my friend,very good at portrait drawing said that she uses photos only if knows her clients very well. but it's not often.


p.s. sorry for my poor english.

[Novacaptain]

I believe the film doesn�t have such a large range of values as the eyes do. This means that what we�d see as a pretty dark color would (on the photo) be black. Light colors would be substituted by white.

please, correct me if i�m wrong on this.

[Frog]

That's correct, film handles a much narrower range of contrasts than the eye does, which is why if you take a picture of someone at sunset they come out in silhouette in the the photo although you could clearly see their faces at the time.

The other thing you need to bear in mind when using photo references are that lenses use different focal lenghts, with different results. For instance, wide angle lenses make the foreground appear relatively bigger and make the background recede so a person's face in close up with a wide angle will make it look distorted and oversized. A telephoto lens (80mm or more) will have the opposite effect and will compress the perspective, which is why fashion photographers use them as they are usually flattering to models, making their features look more even and regular.

Also lenses of different focal lenghts treat perspective in completely different ways, a wide angle landscape taken at eye level appears to start from where your toes are, almost as if it's curving from underneath you whereas the same view taken with a telephoto will appear as if it's all on one compressed plane.

here's two examples, not mine, borrowed from photo.net, both pics by Dan Heller, www.danheller.com

wide:



tele:



It really helps to have an understanding of photography if you're going to use photo reference, because if you don't understand what you're drawing from then that could very easily translate into confused looking pictures.

Hope that's helped.

[ February 13, 2002: Message edited by: Frog ]

[Novacaptain]

The lens closest to the "human eye" would be what? 35 mm?

another thing...

while a camera has 1 lens your eyes are like 2 that take pictures simultaneously with a little distance from eachother - this gives you a "true 3D" vision of things that your brain has to translate into 2D for the paper/tablet/canvas.

Using a photo reference this "translation process" is already done, robbing your brain of the useful exercise

[Duckman2]

Oh don't get me wrong, I don't think photos are good substitutes for a live model, but lets say you are doing a portrait of a busy executive, now they need to have lots of valuabe paper shredding time taken away and they are forced to sit in a chair for who knows how many sittings. Most portrait artists will do a quick sketch from life first use photos for developing the peice then have a live session to put the finishing touches on the thing.

[Frog]

You cannot really compare the human eye to any lens Novacaptain, it works a little differently. The FOV of human vision is quite wide, if you hold your open hand right up to your eye but slightly to the side you can see that the angle is pretty wide, probably like a 15mm lens or so.

However, only the very central part of our retina has sharp vision, so your eyes have to constantly scan. This is why you move your eyes when reading a page, even though a line of text doesn't have a great deal of span, there is only a very small protion of your eye that is sharp enough to read it. In this way our eyes are more similar to telephoto lenses.

The way we perceive a scene, say a panoramic view, is to constantly scan different parts of it so that our brains build up a complete picture (try and observe this in RL sometime). So in a sense our vision is both wide and narrow, but nothing like a camera lens.

FYI, it is commonly said that the camera lens which most closely resembles the perspective of human vision is 50mm, but I don't really subscribe to that view for the reasons stated above.