Portrait Of

Keep it simple

The simplest possible background is a painted wall, or a sheet or blanket hung versus a wall. Generally, such a background must have a matte surface to prevent reflections (especially when using fill-in flash).

Try to keep away from colour clashes with the subject and their clothing. Hot colours (reds, oranges) advance and are best avoided, while cool colours (greens, blues) recede and support the subject stand-out. Also undertake to keep away from tonal clashes such as a pale subject versus a very dark background, or a dark subject versus a very light backdrop. It is highly likely that your camera meter will not cope well with such extremes.

Don’t use backgrounds with horizontal and/or vertical lines. A brick wall, for example, makes a in particular bad background due to the severe horizontal and vertical lines, plus the red colour of brick is too warm and clashes with most skin colours.

The overall intention ought to be to denigrate the contest for attention amid the subject and the background.

De clutter

If you are unable to find a suitably plain backdrop (or determine not use one for other reasons), move any unnecessary clutter from the background. Reflective objects in queer are best got rid of out of shot (e.g. mirrors, pictures under glass).

If possible, use a big aperture setting to put the background out of focus. This has the added gain of making the subject stand out sharply. The further away the background is, the darker and the more out of focus it will appear.

When outdoors, don’t shoot versus hedges as a backdrop. They are commonly too dark, and tend to leak light developing a speckled effect. Trees do not make good backdrops either, and subdivisions have a habit of appearing as though they are sticking out of heads.

Horizons

If there is a horizon in the background, try to keep it either low or high to refrain from dividing the picture in half. Careless positioning may cause unfitting juxtapositions, such as hedges appearing to go into the subject’s ear and out the other.

Appropriateness

An suitable background is something that reflects the reputation of the subject. Returning to our brick wall; if the subject is a Brick Layer, and in work clothes, then a brick wall might become a suitable backdrop?

Portrait Of

The Classic “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce.

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21795 in Books
• Published on: 2012-01-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .64 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Portrait Of Picture

Portrait Of Image

Portrait Of Picture

Portrait Of Image

Portrait Of Photo

Portrait Of Photo

98 of 103 people found the following review helpful.
the edition to get
By Caraculiambro
If you’re gonna buy a copy of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” you can’t go wrong with the Wordsworth Classic edition. Its advantages are several:

1. It’s extremely cheap.
2. It features a very long and immensely insightful (32-page) introduction by Jaqueline Belanger, which includes a biography, publishing background, sections on language structure, irony, etc. There are also many suggestions for further syntopic or critical reading.
3. The thing is complete and unabridged.
4. There are extensive footnotes at the end, which are keyed throughout in the text, explaining all the Latin and the extinct realia of Joyce’s world.

In short, get it.

As for the work itself, it’s a very good prepper for “Ulysses:” I started that novel without having done this one. Later I came back to this: much was made clearer. Don’t make my mistake.

161 of 174 people found the following review helpful.
A tough read, but more than worth it
By Wheelchair Assassin
I’m always up for a good challenge, whether it be in books, music or movies, and from what I’ve heard Joyce is about as challenging as they come in the literary world. However, since it seemed like “Ulysses” or “Finnegan’s Wake” would be a bit much to start with, I found myself reading “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” as an introduction to his work. And although I found this book about as easy to get into as Princeton, it was about as rewarding as well. “Portrait” is certainly anything but a light read. Joyce’s meandering narrative and serpentine prose can be confusing to say the least, and on more than one occasion I had to read a sentence about five times in order to figure out what I had just read. For all its verbosity, though, “Portrait” is an essential read because the story of Stephen Dedalus carries so much resonance. I’m about the same age as Stephen was in this story, and I can relate pretty easily to his search for answers. Growing up in Ireland around the turn of the twentieth century, Stephen faces existential questions that should ring true for a young person coming from any culture at any time. He tries to find satisfaction by giving in to his lust, and when that doesn’t work he goes all the way to the other end of the spectrum in seeking fulfillment through religious devotion. In the end, however, neither of these extremes provides Stephen with the answers he’s looking for. Stephen’s story demonstrates one unfortunate fact of life: when you’re seeking meaning, there are no easy answers. Ultimately, as Stephen tells his friend Cranly, he decides that his solution is to “express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can,” even if it means making mistakes or being spurned by society. In “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Joyce outlines some important ideas that have since become prominent in literature, notably noncomformity, self-expression, coming of age, and the nature of religious belief. This book may not have been perfectly written, but since Joyce was aiming so high it’s easy to overlook any imperfections in his style. “Portrait” was written with plenty of intelligence and soul, so it’s easy to see why it’s still read after all these years.

70 of 73 people found the following review helpful.
Not easy but well worth the effort
By A
I’ve seen some reviews that criticize the book for being too stream of consciousness and others for not being s.o.c. enough. The fact is, for the most part it’s not s.o.c. at all. (See the Chicago Manual of Style, 10.45-10.47 and note the example they give…Joyce knew how to write s.o.c.). A better word for A Portrait is impressionistic. Joyce is more concerned with giving the reader an impression of Stephen’s experience than with emptying the contents of his head. What’s confusing is the style mirrors the way Stephen interprets his experiences at the time, according to the level of his mental development.

When Stephen is a baby, you get only what comes in through the five senses. When he is a young boy, you get the experience refracted through a prism of many things: his illness (for those who’ve read Ulysses, here is the beginning of Stephen’s hydrophobia – “How cold and slimy the water had been! A fellow had once seen a big rat jump into the scum.”), his poor eyesight, the radically mixed signals he’s been given about religion and politics (the Christmas meal), his unfair punishment, and maybe most important of all, his father’s unusual expressions (growing up with phrases like, “There’s more cunning in one of those warts on his bald head than in a pack of jack foxes” how could this kid become anything but a writer?)

It is crucial to understand that Stephen’s experiences are being given a certain inflection in this way when you come to the middle of the book and the sermon. You have to remember that Stephen has been far from a good Catholic boy. Among other things, he’s been visting the brothels! The sermon hits him with a special intensity, so much so that it changes his life forever. Before it he’s completely absorbed in the physical: food, sex, etc. After it he becomes just as absorbed in the spiritual/aesthetic world. It’s the sermon that really puts him on the track to becoming an artist. One reviewer called the sermon overwrought. Well, of course it’s overwrought. That’s the whole point. Read it with your sense of humor turned on and keep in mind that you’re getting the sermon the way you get everything else in the book: through Stephen.

After Stephen decides he doesn’t want to be a priest, the idea of becoming an artist really starts to take hold. And when he sees the girl on the beach, his life is set for good. That scene has to be one of the most beautiful in all of literature. After that, Stephen develops his theory of esthetics with the help of Aristotle and Aquinas and we find ourselves moving from one conversation to another not unlike in Plato (each conversation with the appropriate inflection of college boy pomposity). In the end, Stephen asks his “father” to support him as he goes into the real world to create something. I like to think that this is an echo of the very first line in the book. The father, in one of many senses, is the moocow story. The story gave birth to Stephen’s imagination and now it’s the son’s turn to create.

This is such a rich and beautiful book. I suppose it’s possible for people to “get it” and still not like it, but I really think if you read and re-read, and maybe do a little research, the book will open up to you the way it did to me.

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