The photograph you send us is the foundation of everything. Here is exactly what we look for — and how to find the best image you already have.
The most common question we receive before a commission begins is not about metal, or price, or timeline. It is: \'Do I have a good enough photograph?\' The answer, almost always, is yes — but the photograph you choose will shape everything that follows. This is a guide to making that choice well.
What We Are Actually Looking For
A portrait medallion is a three-dimensional object. Our sculptor is not copying your photograph — she is using it as evidence from which to reconstruct a face in the round. This distinction matters enormously when it comes to choosing an image.
What we need from a photograph is information about structure: the depth of the eye sockets, the projection of the nose, the relationship between the cheekbones and the jaw, the way the forehead meets the brow. A photograph that gives us this information clearly — even if it is not technically perfect — is more useful than a beautifully lit studio portrait that flattens the face into a smooth, shadowless plane.
“We are not copying your photograph. We are using it as evidence from which to reconstruct a face in the round.”
The Best Angle: Why Three-Quarter Beats Everything
If you have one photograph to choose, choose a three-quarter profile — the face turned approximately 30 to 45 degrees from the camera, so that both eyes are visible but the face is clearly angled. This view reveals more structural information than any other: you can see the depth of the eye socket on the near side, the projection of the cheekbone, the relationship between the nose and the cheek, and the recession of the far side of the face.
A direct frontal portrait — face square to the camera — is the least useful single image, because it collapses all depth into a flat plane. The nose appears as a shape rather than a projection. The eye sockets read as shadow rather than recession. We can work from a frontal portrait, but we will need additional images to compensate for what it cannot tell us.
A true profile — face turned fully to one side — is excellent for capturing the silhouette of the features, and is in fact the traditional view for portrait medals. If you have a strong profile photograph, it is always worth including.
Light: The Single Most Important Technical Factor
Natural light from one side is the most useful lighting for our purposes. It creates shadow — and shadow is information. The way light falls across a cheekbone and drops into shadow beneath it tells us exactly how much that cheekbone projects. The shadow in the eye socket tells us how deep the socket is. The highlight on the tip of the nose tells us its exact shape.
Photographs taken in flat, even light — overcast outdoor light, or indoor flash — are harder to work from because they suppress the shadows that carry structural information. Photographs taken in direct harsh sunlight can be equally difficult, because the shadows become so deep that detail is lost entirely.
The ideal: a photograph taken near a window on a bright but overcast day, or in open shade with a light source to one side. Candid photographs taken in these conditions — at a family lunch, in a garden, at a kitchen table — are often our most useful source material.
Resolution and Sharpness
We are often asked whether old or low-resolution photographs can be used. The answer is yes, with some caveats. A sharp 35mm film photograph from the 1970s, even if slightly faded, contains more usable detail than a blurry smartphone image taken last year. What matters is not the technology but the sharpness of the image at the scale of the face.
If you are working from a physical photograph, scan it at the highest resolution your scanner allows — 1200 dpi or above if possible. Do not photograph a photograph with your phone; the resulting image will have two layers of optical distortion and will be significantly less useful than a scan.
For digital photographs, send us the original file rather than a compressed version. WhatsApp and some email clients compress images significantly. We prefer files sent via email as attachments, or shared via a cloud link, to preserve the original quality.
“A sharp photograph from 1971 is more useful than a blurry one from last week. What matters is not the technology but the sharpness of the face.”
Send More Than One
We always ask clients to send as many photographs as they can find, and we mean this. Seven photographs from different angles and different periods of a person\'s life give us far more to work with than one perfect image. We are building a composite understanding of a face — its proportions, its characteristic expressions, the features that are most distinctively that person — and a single photograph, however good, can only tell us so much.
Photographs from different ages are particularly valuable. A portrait of someone at 40 and at 70 tells us which features are structural — the bone beneath the skin — and which are the effects of time. The structural features are what we are sculpting. Knowing which is which helps us make better decisions.
What If the Only Photograph Is Not Very Good?
We have worked from photographs that were blurry, faded, torn, partially obscured, and taken from a distance. We have worked from a single image where the subject was partially turned away. We have worked from a photograph of a photograph, taken on a phone, of a framed print hanging on a wall.
In every case, we were honest with the client about what we could and could not achieve from the available material. Sometimes the result is a portrait of extraordinary likeness. Sometimes it is a portrait that captures the essence of a person without being a precise likeness — something more impressionistic, more about presence than exact feature-by-feature accuracy. Both outcomes have value. Both have moved clients to tears.
If you are uncertain whether your photographs are good enough, send them to us. We will tell you honestly what we can do with them — and we will never turn away a commission simply because the source material is imperfect. The imperfect photograph of someone irreplaceable is always worth more than no photograph at all.
