Capturing the Perfect Portrait: Photography 2021 Annual Platinum and Gold Winners

Portraits are the topic of this week’s Photography 2021 Annual Platinum and Gold award winners. Whether a person or even an object, feature pictures with famous men and cars as the subjects.

The first image, “Chadwick Boseman“, was taken by US photographer Dylan Coulter (above, left). The portrait of Boseman, who is best remembered for his role as Black Panther, was taken for Coulter’s client ShortList Magazine as Boseman was the magazine’s cover star; the image was taken using a Nikon 850 camera. Shot in black and white, Coulter used a silvery backdropt for the image, and had Boseman strike and powerful yet thoughtful pose, his turned directly towards the camera. For his work, Coulter received a Platinum award from the Graphis judges.  

A less recognizable face appears within “David (Albrecht) Swartz”, which was shot by US photographer Bruce DeBoer for his clients Dave Swartz and CP+B (above, right) with a Canon EOS 5DSR camera. The assignment was to shoot a photograph of Dave Swartz that mimics the self-portrait of the great 15^th century German painter Albrecht Duerer. DeBoer and his team relied heavily on hair, makeup, styling, and wardrobe to get very close to the original look of the painting. The lighting, expression, and body position was also matched as closely as possible. Postproduction was used to finesse the final look, but there were no dramatic changes. For their work on this portrait, DeBoer and his team also received a Platinum award.

The last entry has a car as the main subject. “Audi RS Launch Campaign” is the work of Canadian photographer Jeffrey Carlson for Audi North America (above). Carlson was selected by Taxi Toronto to create a series of images for the launch of the new Audi RS series; these images were originally shot for the Canadian market, but they were later picked up by Audi USA. He wanted to elevate this shoot by shooting all color in camera, so to achieve this, Carlson shot the cars on studio that was fully lit with full spectrum LED lights. This allowed him to tweak the background to whatever color needed, and Astera pixel tubes helped provide contrasting colors and reflections in the cars. Along with the series gaining lots of traction and catching the eye of Audi USA, Carlson also received a Gold award from the Graphis judges.

To see more award-winning submissions, purchase the Graphis Photography Annual 2021 at graphis.com.