Q: I was wondering why, in a lot of your portraits, you cut off half of one of the ears or the side of the face?
Yes, yes I do. And yes it is intentional!
Firstly, I want to draw the eye in to specific features of the face, normally the eye so I use a lot of negative space to one side to do this.
I crop quite hard and try and do most of this in camera. Sometimes it is because of where the light is falling and I want to get the contrast of the ground against the body in the background or to use the light to again highlight the face.
A lot of the time the sun, or light, is on the models face however sometimes I use the shadows to perform the same effect.
In the photographs below of Nixie Lix, in the first her right eye was almost completely dark, it would have been lost in the image and the eye on the left would have been hovering out past the middle. I think this is a much stronger photograph just by shifting the composition to the right a little. The photograph on the right uses the contrasting colour of her eye to draw the view in but if I was going to do anything else with it, I probably would crop it a little harder.
If you have a question for me, feel free to send it through either in the comments or tweet me, facebook me or grab me when you see me x
