After watching Dawoud Bey‘s photographs about Class pictures. His works give people a very careful description of emotions and young people have different feeling about themselves and give a student a kind of mysterious color. Bey is very good at using body movements and faces to express the emotions of the portrait. His expression is relaxed and natural. The main forms are in the eyes and the overall body sounds. Each portrait has different poses, and different poses convey different messages. I think the most important thing is the hand movements, different hand movements represent different emotions. For example, the first picture of a girl’s hands is against her face. It gives people a very ethereal and clean feeling. He was also very careful about the use of light, he used Butterfly Lighting style to create shadow of the chin and aside. Also use Rembrandt lighting style to create triangle and shadow on the side of face. His foreground is always the character itself, the background is illusory, but gives a sense of life. Each portrait makes good use of the relationship between foreground and background to express the main subject and other subjects. Most of his framing of portrait is in the center and part of the classroom scene. Let us know he is a student. Models always look at the camera, they all have different expressions and emotions on their faces. I can learn from his works that it is necessary to have a certain amount of time to get to know the model when starting photography. This will make the model relaxed and natural to accept the shooting. Having the models pose in a way that they are comfortable with will allow the photography process to progress quickly.
It may take sometime to photograph someone but remember Bey isn’t taking that much time. He doesn’t just shoot one frame but still he gets it done in under 40 minutes. As to pose, it is important to watch the model and see what they do naturally. there may also be times when you want to suggest a pose and it may or may not work. And every model will benefit from bringing their chin down. Or some photographers like to say put the forehead forward. same idea.