Katrin Viil: Gorgeous Use of Specific Color in Portraiture

All images by Katrin Viil. Used with permission.

“I’ve always been a creative mind.” explains photographer Katrin Viil. “First taking photos of myself, then friends, models, clients etc. I started out with self portraits and male nudes.” Katrin hails from Amsterdam and considers herself a fine art photographer specializing in couples, fetish, fashion, erotica and portraits. Indeed, for Katrin the traditional genres were way too boring.

For that reason, Katrin started to get really experimental. “So I combined nude with fashion into erotic/fashion and not long did it take for fetish to start to give me inspiration.” she explains. “I’m strongly motivated by creating beauty and giving a bit of intrigue. I love minimalism.” All of this is evident on her photos. You see, one of the biggest rules of portraiture is to keep your colors relatively simple. Steve McCurry for example uses three primary colors in his images: a fair stagnant background, skin tones and clothing colors. These three colors working together don’t overwhelm the eye and do more than traditional depth of field effects to separate a subject from the background.

There are loads and loads of other photographers who do this method while using tones and lighting to continue to add even more contrast in the scene in an effort to make their subjects stand out. Look at modern fashion for example: this is a very common technique. Interestingly enough, it’s also a technique that hasn’t moved into cinema that much perhaps because moving portraiture isn’t a common.

Katrin shoots with a Canon 6D and a 24-70mm lens. “My inspiration is Erwin Olaf from Amsterdam.” she explains. ” (My) dream would be to meet him on person or intern him, or even better get him as my mentor.”

You can see more photos from Katrin over at her Instagram.