While prepping for a recent photo shoot, I asked myself “is it possible to take a fresh look at portraiture?” The standard definition of portrait is pretty broad and I guess by design, leaves much to the individual “portraitists” interpretation.

Portriat
noun
1 a painting, drawing, photograph, or engraving of a person, esp. one depicting only the face or head and shoulders.

When shooting this series of images I wanted to break beyond the “tilted head” posed portrait and create a look that would really catch attention. I wanted to at once be provocative, evoke a sense of sensuality, while not being pornographic.

Since this photo is posed (or rather, guided), it’s not really a candid, looking at the definition above it is technically a portrait… or is it?

Could this be Portrait Photojournalism?

These images were captured in my studio with a Nikon D3, Speed-o-tron studio strobes, and post-processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop CS3 Extended

**note: the original image in this post has been replaced with the current one.