21.01.10
Matt Hoyle - How to take your portraits to another dimension
Matt Hoyle is a commercial and fine art photographer based in New York. His work has been used by Wired, New York magazine, Fast Company, and Billboard as well as brands such as Fed Ex, Visa, Jim Beam and Mini Cooper. He has been selected as one of the 200 Best Ad Photographers by Lurzer's Archive, and has appeared in the IPA Best of Show on numerous occasions. Matt's personal work has been hung internationally and in the National Portrait Gallery, among others.
Best of the best
“Once I have the image I want from the shoot, I start correcting things that are ordinary. It could be darkening or lightening some areas that blew out or filled in. I'll clean up flyaway hairs and minimise other flaws like sheen, sweat or dust.”
What’s your style?
Everything I shoot comes from wanting to bring out the essence of the person I'm photographing. The facial or styling characteristics really add to the telling of the story, so I endeavour to be true to the person and story. This manifests itself in the styling, directing and the hyper-real pop I give to my subjects.
ON THE SHOOT
- For the image on the cover, I shot 125 at f11, which means most of the time I get enough detail.
- I used a 50mm lens and was four to five feet from the subject while taking the shot. I gave him a 'hero area' to play within, and just snapped a series of expressions of him being him.
- Robbie Concannon, the subject, is known as a Bostonian character– fun, brash and boisterous. So I wanted him to stay in character for the entire shoot. We even did shots of him jumping around in a straitjacket that seemed to capture his essence. For the cover shot, we put a firecracker in his mouth as if he were about to smoke it. I ‘lit’ it in post-production.
- I leave it a day, and when I'm fresh, I make edits to shortlist the good shots. I use Adobe Bridge and four-star the good shots. Then I go back over the shots and five-star the special ones and hopefully there's at least one of those [I can use]. I then begin work on that shot.
Post production
Identify strengths
“For all images I mask out the background, whether I'm dropping in another or not, as it gives me control of my subject and background separately. I then work in Photoshop to bring out the subject’s main features. This may mean contrasting, it may mean softening or de-saturating or saturating – whatever I choose to do. It's never about doing a stock standard look every time, and more about treating each person differently.”
Accentuate the essence
“Much of my work is described as 'popping' or 'hyper real', but that's because I like to accentuate the essence of my subject. This shouldn't be mistaken for removing character with plastic over-retouching. It can take me 20 minutes
to add contrast, tone background and sharpen, or it can take me a day to mask, add backgrounds and Frankenstein an image (when a client wants me to use lots of parts for one ideal shot.”
Draw out the character
“Once I have the look I want, the next step is to bring out as much of the expression and character as I can. So I correct any exposure problems, which for the cover shot meant bringing down the forehead and nose highlights, then adding a little pop to the eyes and an overall contrast. I added an adjustment layer of black and white and really played with the various channels to get maximum contrast in each colour.”
Give it one last pop
“Next I used the soft light dropdown blending mode on the black and white layer. This created a lot of contrast, so I pulled back the opacity so only the most prominent features retained the added contrast. I copied and merged everything into a separate layer and used a high pass filter at about 10 pixels. I made this layer a soft light blending layer, added a mask to it and painted just the eyes and lips to give the image more pop.”
Five easy steps to shooting like Matt
Leave room for spontaneity by controlling all other aspects. Make sure lights, props, wardrobe and even the environment are ready beforehand.
Keep the colour palette simple and harmonious. I work on getting a palette of a maximum of three colours to work together – one hero colour and one complimentary colour and then a more subdued tone for the rest of the shot.
If the person has blue eyes and is tanned, I dress them in something more poppy and saturated in a primary colour, but tone the background a more cyan blue/green so that it really contrasts with the warmth of their skin,
while also bringing out the blue in their eyes.
It's all about simplicity. When you're shooting a planned shot, you've no excuse not to keep the background free of clutter, but you can also style it if it adds to the personality of the subject.
As important as preparation, an interesting subject and post production, is directing the subject in the first place. It's your job to unearth their most interesting and captivating personality for the shot. This means a strong relationship with the subject, strong interaction and knowing what you want to begin with. When communicating with the subject,
I try to bring an expression to a realistic scene so they're not just posing a frozen, unnatural look.
Get them to act something out, even if it's yawning or staring, I get them to do it in a short 15-second scene and I try to shoot a natural in-between moment.
I try to get as much of the personality of the person to pop off the page while still keeping their raw human essence. I like the effect created by their skin textures and imperfections, but at the same time I like the furrowing of the brow or the grin on their cheek and mouth, so I'll contrast, sharpen or even defocus everything else if that helps tell the story of this person.
Matt’s kit bag
I shoot predominantly on a Canon 1DS MkIII mounted on a Manfrotto ball head and tripod. I like a 50mm lens, but sometimes go wider to 35mm when I need to take in a landscape or environment. I do shoot with a prime lens sometimes, but it's often more convenient and flexible to shoot with my Canon 24-70mm 2.8. I keep lighting really simple and try to get a soft, slightly asymmetrical front light (usually my 7ft Octabank umbrella) high and just to the right of the subject. I then like to back/side light them to get them to pop, so I use two lights with barn doors slightly behind and to each side of the subject, careful to point so the side of the body is rim lit, but doesn't wrap around to light or cause shadow on the nose.
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