NZPhotographer Issue 61, November 2022

Perspective On Projection Portraits
by Fairlie Atkinson
If you’re a portrait photographer looking to achieve
something with a difference, projection portraits are
not hard to achieve whether you’re working from
home or in your own studio.
The first step is to darken the room. Try and shut out
all external light if you can. We were working in a
classroom at a public high school during school hours,
so this was hard, but we managed to cover all the
windows and doors with black paper and cardboard.
The next thing you need is an untextured wall. This is
relatively easy in a studio, but as seen in September’s
issue, not everyone has a studio, so many people
have become very good at leveraging the spaces
around them. In the case of your home or garage,
find a space with a wall onto which you can project
an image without it becoming distorted.
We were lucky enough to have an overhead school
projector hung from our ceiling in the classroom.
However, you can pick up a relatively cheap portable
projector these days and simply plug it into your
laptop. Saying that, I wouldn’t rush out to buy new
equipment, look at borrowing, hiring or even buying
something small second-hand that can be set up with
minimal preparation in a room in your home first.
Choosing what to project will depend largely on
what your model is wearing. You can project just
about anything onto bare skin, but with clothing, dark
colours work best and provide the best contrast, even
when the projected image is dark. Projecting images
onto white clothing is not very successful unless all the
colours in your image are dark.
We all shot on 55mm lenses on a variety of cameras,
and I would recommend starting with the same if you
are not in a studio or you may not get far enough
back from your subject to be able to create a
statement with your image.
In our first example, students wanted to project their
home town onto their bodies to create an image of
belonging. We projected directly onto the whiteboard
to see whether it would work as a backdrop. While the
whiteboard worked well, the white clothing washed
out the colour of the sea and created a perspective
of negative space where there should have been
water. As you can also see, shooting with the
projection onto the whiteboard (and probably any
reflective surface) means you have to move around
and find an angle where there is no reflective glare
from the projection onto the whiteboard.
60 November 2022 NZPhotographer