AOP part 52: Floortraits

height waist portrait maja ladder Simon Q. Walden, FilmPhotoAcademy.com, sqw, FilmPhoto, photography

I love the word "floortrait" - it is basically a portrait where the model is lying on the floor. It joins in my lexicon with the made up word "fasmati" which means a post on social media that implies something dramatic without giving any details.

Anyway, back to photography. The usual problem with a floortrait is getting sufficiently high enough not to need a wide angle lens to fit everything in. Because this was an old warehouse of course there were trapdoors running top to bottom. So I was able to shoot from the next floor up and directly over Maja. This is at around 50mm focal length.

In this shot I have put Maja to the left of frame, this gives a compositional imbalance to add a dynamic to the image.

Under normal circumstances you would normally use a ladder of course. This puts you much closer to the subject and it is almost impossible to shoot without getting the feet of the ladder in shot.

You need to make sure your position matches the equivalent height if it was a standing portrait. So for a full length standing image I want the camera height to be around waist to chest height. When rotated to this overhead angle the camera position is directly above the waist and chest.

 
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Maja stina model, height waist portrait maja ladder Simon Q. Walden, FilmPhotoAcademy.com, sqw, FilmPhoto, photography

This is an excerpt from "Anatomy of a Photoshoot" which gives a complete breakdown of two days shooting with a full in-depth step by step review of everything that I do.

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