The Martin Schoeller close-up portrait

In the last few months, I've found several pieces of literature, ads, magazine articles/covers and even books with these interesting close-up facial portraits in them. I picked up an edition of Esquire the other day at Hy-Vee (home of the greatest Chinese food in SD) and found an interesting article containing more of these close-up, slightly creepy yet not-quite-a-mugshot facial portraits. The photos are the work of a professional photographer named Martin Schoeller.

Mr. Schoeller has photographed thousands of celebrities using this same technique with two strobe lights and a shallow depth of field.

So, after closely studying a few of Shoeller's famous faces, I decided to take a crack at the method. I talked my roommates into letting me get uncomfortably close to their mugs with my 50mm. The main challenge of making this style of portrait is to create an interesting facial closeup without letting it look like a mugshot in a poorly-lit hallway. After about 10 minutes of shooting, and a few minor touch-ups in PhotoShop, I came up with these two portraits (click for full-size view):










































I photographed Matthew (top) first and Brett second. You might notice that the white balance has been slightly adjusted in each photo. Although they are identical in composition, they each have a unique feel because of the difference in white balance. I used a wider aperture in the first photo, which gave it a shallower depth of field and a slightly overexposed look. You can spot this difference by looking at the blurriness of their ears. The second challenge was to get the strobes in just the right position. Too far outside and I had too much shadow, too close to center and they would blow out the facial definition. I also wanted to get the circular catch-lights on each side of their pupils.

Overall, I had a lot of fun trying out my new studio equipment with my roommates. It was nice to try something new. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Links:

Martin Schoeller on Wikipedia
Martin Shoeller on/in Esquire
www.martinshoeller.com (a very cool website)