This photo, a self-portrait by Will Burgdorf from 1930 strikes me as rather spectacular. I've seen and taken many portraits with shallow DOF, but do not remember it having this sort of 3D-effect. Can anyone elucidate what is going on here, and maybe how to recreate to? The photo can be found at Wikimedia Commons.
It’s magical when a two-dimensional flat photograph exhibits the illusion of depth. This is especially true when its deliberate based on repeatable skills. Many of the old master portrait photographers had such talent. Fortunately, this talent still exists but it’s rare.
This image owes its illusion of depth to its high contrast. Portrait photographers usually light the face with a lamp positioned high to simulate afternoon sun. If lit by a single undiffused lamp, the shadows cast go dark, void of detail. This yields “hard” lighting that gives the illusion of depth. Some subjects are enhanced as this can be perceived as very masculine lighting. On the other hand, most subjects are handled better by adding a second “fill light” that illuminates the shadows, so details come through.
The bottom line, the flat two-dimensional photograph can display depth if the lighting and perspective are well controlled.
It's just short subject distance perspective; typically associated with using a wide angle lens (to allow the composition from short distance).
I don't have an example human portrait at hand, but I have this image...
It's mostly about lighting from an angle well off the camera lens' optical axis combined with a very wide aperture to get narrow depth of field.
Here the key light is fairly hard from above and wide to camera right, with much weaker and softer fill almost directly to the left of the subject.
In the case of this portrait, the effect is even more noticeable because the focus is somewhere between the tip of the nose and the lips, rather than the eyelids that are further away from the camera. There also seems to be a hint of tilt involved, as the field of focus seems to be slight further back on the right side and slightly further forward on the left.
Based on the date of the portrait as well as the appearance of this and other works by Will Burgdorf, it was probably taken with a large format camera. Most LF cameras at that time were what we now call "view" cameras with a bellows between the front lens board and the rear film holder. This allowed for independent control of tilt and shift movements of the lens. It may be that the slight tilt seen in this self portrait is intentional, but probably more likely that the camera was just not carefully adjusted to insure the lens board was exactly parallel to the film holder. Or it could have been that the film itself was not laying properly flat against the film holder.
