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http://improvephotography.com/1305/101-portrait-photography-tips-to-improve-your-photography/
101 Portrait Photography Tips
This is the largest collection of portrait photography tips ever assembled on a single page of the Internet. To write this portrait photography article, I asked members of the Improve Photography community to submit their favorite portrait photography tips. This article is a combination of my favorite tips, mixed in with the tips from the community.
If you’d like to join the Improve Photography community, LIKE our Facebook fan page!
1. Photograph the subject in their native environment. Some people just don’t belong in a studio. They feel awkward and it shows in camera. So instead of forcing Grandpa into the Walmart Photo Studio, let him go to work in his workshop and photograph him doing what he loves. Instead of tears and tantrums when you try to dress up your child all pretty for studio punishment, let him play with the toys and snap pictures of every moment.
2. Never shoot kids or babies from your normal standing height. This is the view we always have of kids-the tops of their heads. Get down on the ground and take images from their level.
3. Consider giving the subject space to look into. Place the subject on one side of the image and have them look into space (not the camera) towards the other side of the frame.
Window light
4. Window light. Don’t have an expensive studio or want to get more natural portraits? Normal lighting in a house or during the heat of the day is not flattering on skin; however, once light passes through a window, it is very soft and diffused. Consider placing your subject next to a window so the light hits the model at an angle (not looking straight out the window). Without much effort, you’ve created beautiful light which studios strain to copy.
5. NEVER use the on-camera flash. On-camera flash gives a deer-in-the-headlights look to even the most beautiful subject. Because the light is perfectly in line with the lens, the light hits the subject squarely and creates a flat light that is far from flattering. If you choose to use a flash, it’s truly necessary to get an external flash that can be mounted to the side of the photographer.
I call it a “macro portrait.” It’s a picture inside a larger picture.
6. I know you want pictures of the face, but you might also consider going smaller. What about photographing a child’s sandy feet while he plays on the beach or your grandmother’s hands, or your friend’s eye. Sometimes the tiniest details speak volumes.
7. Over expose. I know I just spent two pages telling you not to do this, but over exposing (making the image too bright) is a common and beautiful technique for giving a portrait a clean and simple look.
8. Do something totally off-the-wall. Want cool pictures of your friend in her prom dress? Throw her in the pool with the prom dress on. Want cute pics of a baby? Put them in a huge basket like Anne Geddes or dress them in clothes that are 5 sizes too big.
9. Stop the waving and smiling. When shooting family pictures, nothing can ruin the moment more than saying, “Hey Dan, look at the camera!” Your picture will be destroyed. I’m not saying you have to shoot candid photography all the time, but when you are going to have the subject know you’re taking the picture, at least pose the subject properly rather than having them just stand off squarely at the camera.
10. Shoot up to give power; Shoot down to take power away. In tip #2, I mentioned that it generally isn’t good to shoot down on babies and kids. The reason is that kids are already small, so shooting down on them is so common that the photo does not look as it should. Similarly, you can make a subject seem more powerful by shooting from a lower angle up to the subject. For example, it would be ridiculous to shoot Michael Jordan from above. Since you want to make a sports star look powerful, it would make much more sense to shoot that subject from a lower angle.
11. If one person is a bit stale, two people are perfect. Whenever I’m shooting a subject that gets a bit camera-shy and won’t give me much of an expression, I always try to let the person interact with someone different. For example, trying to get kids to have fun and smile will be tough without a parent being in the studio too. This technique works the same with adults. If your subject looks a bit stale, wait until they talk with someone else to capture the best expressions.
Especially where brides are wearing white dresses, the bride’s teeth need to be perfect.
12. Whiten teeth properly in Photoshop. For quite a long time, I brushed exposure onto the teeth to make them look whiter. I never got the results I wanted until another photography told me that it was better to brush brightness onto the teeth rather than exposure. Overnight, my digital teeth whitening improved drastically. Try it!
13. Contrast clothing and location. I recently shot engagement photos for a couple who chose to wear bright colors. The bride wore bright pink and the groom wore a light blue shirt. Those colors undoubtedly catch the viewer’s attention, so I chose to place them in front of muted backgrounds. For this shot, I chose old grey brick walls, blurred out dark backgrounds, etc. The results were perfect! You can also apply this tip when shooting a model who is wearing muted colors. In this situation, shoot the model against a brightly colored background to make the model stand out.
14. You’re missing out on half of your model. No, I don’t mean that you could be shooting twice as many people. I mean that there is a whole other side of your clients that you aren’t shooting at all. What’s that side? The back side. Shots of the subject walking away from the camera, or of the subject’s body turned away from the camera and head facing the camera can be quite compelling.
15. Think application before taking the portrait. What is your photo going to be used for? While many of our photos are just used generally for looking at, some photos would be better either vertical or horizontal if it is going to be used for a specific purpose. For example, if you’re taking a portrait for someone’s Facebook profile, you can get a much larger picture by shooting it in vertical orientation (up-and-down). If you’re shooting for a wedding announcement, it’s probably better to shoot horizontal so there is enough room for text on the side of the couple.
Backlighting is great for hard mid-day light.
16. When shooting in poor mid-day lighting, have the subject face away from the sun. I see this done wrong more often than not. Most of the time, photographers have the subject face the sun so their face doesn’t look dim and shadowy in mid-day lighting. This is unfortunate, because the hard light will create unflattering shadows on the face. The best way to shoot mid-day portraits is to have the subject face away from the sun so their face is in the shade, and then have the photographer over-expose the picture so the face looks properly exposed.
17. Spot metering is your friend. If you don’t feel comfortable setting the exposure manually to do the technique taught in tip #16, then learn to use spot metering. With spot metering, you can simply have the camera meter on the subject’s face to expose it properly, and then let the background be slightly overexposed. For some people, spot metering may be a better option than manually setting the exposure for the face.
18. Whip out the CTO. When shooting in lower light (or if you have a really powerful strobe), you can put an orange gel on your flash so that the light that hits the subject is, well… orange. Then, you adjust your white balance (I always just do it later in Lightroom) so the subject looks neutral, which makes the background turn blue. Here is a great collection of examples of using this color shifting technique. (Side note: I couldn’t remember the term color shifting this morning, and several helpful readers reminded me on the ImprovePhotography Facebook fan page). If you’ve never heard of gelling a flash, you will be surprised to know that a gel is not “jelly-like” in consistency. It’s just a plastic colored transparency. You can buy a set of gels for around $10 on Amazon that fit most flashes.
19. Compose and then focus rather than focusing and re-composing. Could I have made this tip any more confusing? Probably not. What I mean is that it is generally preferable to compose the shot and then move your focus point on to the eye of the subject rather than focusing on the eye and then recomposing. For more on this, check out this previous post on focus.
Bubblegum can be a fun prop to help the model get a few casual shots.
20. Models relax immediately when a prop is introduced. Being a model is scary stuff. It’s just you vs. the guy with the giant lens. When I see a subject feeling uncomfortable, I immediately search for a prop. Pick a flower and give it to the bride to play with, give the couple bubblegum and take a photo of them blowing bubbles together, give a kid a toy, etc. You don’t necessarily have to include the prop in the frame (although it usually looks cool), but it is a guaranteed way to get the subject to relax a bit.
21. Book a “real” photo shoot. Contrary to popular belief, models are a dime a dozen no matter where you live. Head on over to ModelMayhem.com and find a local model. Many of them will not even charge you if you give them copies of the pictures you take. It’s called TFP-time for prints. Oh, a warning on ModelMayhem… 90% of the models think their best pictures are when they are “disrobed.” I always have my wife go on the site and choose a model for me so I don’t have to see the nastiness. Not cool.
22. Buy a few scarves. My wife, Emily, made me include this tip for the ladies. She said it’s a great tip for dressing women for a portrait photography shoot, but I think it’s because she has an obsession with Confessions of a Shopaholic (the girl the green scarf). Anyway, it has worked wonders for me in the past. For $15 you can buy probably 10 scarves at any many stores. Then, you can have your female subjects wear plain colors (such as a white T-shirt and jeans) and then wear different colors of scarves. I found that this works GREAT for senior portraits, because teenage girls like “accessorizing” and changing clothes every five minutes. Big time saver and you’ll get many more looks out of one subject.
23. Raise that light for stunning catch lights. Catch lights are a type of specular highlight (the tiny bright spot on any shiny and round object). If you have no idea why catch-lights are cool, check out this article where I explain it. If you’re really picky, the best place to put a flash to get perfect catch-lights is high and a few feet to the side of the subject. This will create catch-lights at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock, which is optimal because then the catch-light doesn’t cover the pupil.
24. The worst way to get a “candid” expression from your subject. Whenever I go on a shoot, I always try and get an assistant that can help pose the subject and make them laugh and play so that I can focus on the photography. My pet peeve is when the assistant says something like, “You look so stiff! Loosen up!” Ugh! Telling the subject that they don’t look good only makes the situation ten times worse. Never tell the subject they look stiff or they need to loosen up. It backfires 100% of the time.
To have your subject framed, she doesn’t have to sit in the middle of the frame. This window frames the subject and still follows traditional rules of composition.
25. Use framing in a creative way. Have your model look through a window or have them lean up against a door frame and your portrait composition can look much stronger and more interesting. I like using this technique to take pictures of babies and toddlers by placing the child in a crib and having them peer through the bars of the crib at the camera. Always makes for a great shot. I’ve tried doing the same thing with people looking through prison bars, but it’s never been quite as flattering.
26. Try high-key or low-key lighting. Some photos look great overexposed for a clean and bright look, but the same model in the same pose can look scary and moody in low-key lighting. Learning to control the amount of light can make a huge difference in the feel of your photo.
27. Quit being a pansy. Many portrait photographers would love to get out and shoot more, but don’t have the opportunity to find models to shoot. Fortunately, any human can be a portrait model (although you probably want to find someone better looking than Scottie Pippen. Yikes). I was teaching a sunset portraiture class in Naples, Florida a few months back and no models were available for the shoot. Did I crawl into a fetal position and cry in the corner all afternoon? Yes, but that was for a different reason. Actually, we just asked random people on the beach if they wanted their pictures taken. By offering to email them the picture, we had tons of different people to practice on and got some fantastic shots.
28. Use ultra-wide lenses for a cool perspective. Shooting portraits with an ultra-wide lens can cause some serious problems if you don’t know how to do it correctly. Wide lenses generally distort facial features, which the subject will hate you for; however, check out this article on wide-angle portraits, and this article on using fisheye lenses creatively and you’ll be on the right track to capture awesome and unique portraits.
29. Warm that flash for sunset portraits. Sunset portraits are a favorite among portrait photographers, but few people do it right. A sunset is not daylight balanced. The light from a sunset is quite warm: red, yellow, and purple. Buy some gels and warm up that flash to make the picture look more natural.
Since the photographer is further away from the model, the photographer has to use a very low aperture to get shallow depth-of-field in this shot.
30. Crank that aperture for full-body portraits. I am shocked on almost a daily basis how many photographers fail to understand that aperture is not the only camera setting that impacts the depth-of-field. To learn the four (or five, depending on how you count) factors that impact depth of field, check out this article. When shooting a full-body portrait, the photographer is obviously further away from the subject. This means that the depth-of-field is much deeper. For full body portraits, remember that your aperture must be significantly lower (or your focal length significantly longer) to get a blurry background. To get shallow depth-of-field for full-body portraits, you might check out the 85mm f1.8 for Nikon, or the 85mm f/1.8 for Canon.
101 Portrait Photography Tips
This is the largest collection of portrait photography tips ever assembled on a single page of the Internet. To write this portrait photography article, I asked members of the Improve Photography community to submit their favorite portrait photography tips. This article is a combination of my favorite tips, mixed in with the tips from the community.
If you’d like to join the Improve Photography community, LIKE our Facebook fan page!
1. Photograph the subject in their native environment. Some people just don’t belong in a studio. They feel awkward and it shows in camera. So instead of forcing Grandpa into the Walmart Photo Studio, let him go to work in his workshop and photograph him doing what he loves. Instead of tears and tantrums when you try to dress up your child all pretty for studio punishment, let him play with the toys and snap pictures of every moment.
2. Never shoot kids or babies from your normal standing height. This is the view we always have of kids-the tops of their heads. Get down on the ground and take images from their level.
3. Consider giving the subject space to look into. Place the subject on one side of the image and have them look into space (not the camera) towards the other side of the frame.
Window light
4. Window light. Don’t have an expensive studio or want to get more natural portraits? Normal lighting in a house or during the heat of the day is not flattering on skin; however, once light passes through a window, it is very soft and diffused. Consider placing your subject next to a window so the light hits the model at an angle (not looking straight out the window). Without much effort, you’ve created beautiful light which studios strain to copy.
5. NEVER use the on-camera flash. On-camera flash gives a deer-in-the-headlights look to even the most beautiful subject. Because the light is perfectly in line with the lens, the light hits the subject squarely and creates a flat light that is far from flattering. If you choose to use a flash, it’s truly necessary to get an external flash that can be mounted to the side of the photographer.
I call it a “macro portrait.” It’s a picture inside a larger picture.
6. I know you want pictures of the face, but you might also consider going smaller. What about photographing a child’s sandy feet while he plays on the beach or your grandmother’s hands, or your friend’s eye. Sometimes the tiniest details speak volumes.
7. Over expose. I know I just spent two pages telling you not to do this, but over exposing (making the image too bright) is a common and beautiful technique for giving a portrait a clean and simple look.
8. Do something totally off-the-wall. Want cool pictures of your friend in her prom dress? Throw her in the pool with the prom dress on. Want cute pics of a baby? Put them in a huge basket like Anne Geddes or dress them in clothes that are 5 sizes too big.
9. Stop the waving and smiling. When shooting family pictures, nothing can ruin the moment more than saying, “Hey Dan, look at the camera!” Your picture will be destroyed. I’m not saying you have to shoot candid photography all the time, but when you are going to have the subject know you’re taking the picture, at least pose the subject properly rather than having them just stand off squarely at the camera.
10. Shoot up to give power; Shoot down to take power away. In tip #2, I mentioned that it generally isn’t good to shoot down on babies and kids. The reason is that kids are already small, so shooting down on them is so common that the photo does not look as it should. Similarly, you can make a subject seem more powerful by shooting from a lower angle up to the subject. For example, it would be ridiculous to shoot Michael Jordan from above. Since you want to make a sports star look powerful, it would make much more sense to shoot that subject from a lower angle.
11. If one person is a bit stale, two people are perfect. Whenever I’m shooting a subject that gets a bit camera-shy and won’t give me much of an expression, I always try to let the person interact with someone different. For example, trying to get kids to have fun and smile will be tough without a parent being in the studio too. This technique works the same with adults. If your subject looks a bit stale, wait until they talk with someone else to capture the best expressions.
Especially where brides are wearing white dresses, the bride’s teeth need to be perfect.
12. Whiten teeth properly in Photoshop. For quite a long time, I brushed exposure onto the teeth to make them look whiter. I never got the results I wanted until another photography told me that it was better to brush brightness onto the teeth rather than exposure. Overnight, my digital teeth whitening improved drastically. Try it!
13. Contrast clothing and location. I recently shot engagement photos for a couple who chose to wear bright colors. The bride wore bright pink and the groom wore a light blue shirt. Those colors undoubtedly catch the viewer’s attention, so I chose to place them in front of muted backgrounds. For this shot, I chose old grey brick walls, blurred out dark backgrounds, etc. The results were perfect! You can also apply this tip when shooting a model who is wearing muted colors. In this situation, shoot the model against a brightly colored background to make the model stand out.
14. You’re missing out on half of your model. No, I don’t mean that you could be shooting twice as many people. I mean that there is a whole other side of your clients that you aren’t shooting at all. What’s that side? The back side. Shots of the subject walking away from the camera, or of the subject’s body turned away from the camera and head facing the camera can be quite compelling.
15. Think application before taking the portrait. What is your photo going to be used for? While many of our photos are just used generally for looking at, some photos would be better either vertical or horizontal if it is going to be used for a specific purpose. For example, if you’re taking a portrait for someone’s Facebook profile, you can get a much larger picture by shooting it in vertical orientation (up-and-down). If you’re shooting for a wedding announcement, it’s probably better to shoot horizontal so there is enough room for text on the side of the couple.
Backlighting is great for hard mid-day light.
16. When shooting in poor mid-day lighting, have the subject face away from the sun. I see this done wrong more often than not. Most of the time, photographers have the subject face the sun so their face doesn’t look dim and shadowy in mid-day lighting. This is unfortunate, because the hard light will create unflattering shadows on the face. The best way to shoot mid-day portraits is to have the subject face away from the sun so their face is in the shade, and then have the photographer over-expose the picture so the face looks properly exposed.
17. Spot metering is your friend. If you don’t feel comfortable setting the exposure manually to do the technique taught in tip #16, then learn to use spot metering. With spot metering, you can simply have the camera meter on the subject’s face to expose it properly, and then let the background be slightly overexposed. For some people, spot metering may be a better option than manually setting the exposure for the face.
18. Whip out the CTO. When shooting in lower light (or if you have a really powerful strobe), you can put an orange gel on your flash so that the light that hits the subject is, well… orange. Then, you adjust your white balance (I always just do it later in Lightroom) so the subject looks neutral, which makes the background turn blue. Here is a great collection of examples of using this color shifting technique. (Side note: I couldn’t remember the term color shifting this morning, and several helpful readers reminded me on the ImprovePhotography Facebook fan page). If you’ve never heard of gelling a flash, you will be surprised to know that a gel is not “jelly-like” in consistency. It’s just a plastic colored transparency. You can buy a set of gels for around $10 on Amazon that fit most flashes.
19. Compose and then focus rather than focusing and re-composing. Could I have made this tip any more confusing? Probably not. What I mean is that it is generally preferable to compose the shot and then move your focus point on to the eye of the subject rather than focusing on the eye and then recomposing. For more on this, check out this previous post on focus.
Bubblegum can be a fun prop to help the model get a few casual shots.
20. Models relax immediately when a prop is introduced. Being a model is scary stuff. It’s just you vs. the guy with the giant lens. When I see a subject feeling uncomfortable, I immediately search for a prop. Pick a flower and give it to the bride to play with, give the couple bubblegum and take a photo of them blowing bubbles together, give a kid a toy, etc. You don’t necessarily have to include the prop in the frame (although it usually looks cool), but it is a guaranteed way to get the subject to relax a bit.
21. Book a “real” photo shoot. Contrary to popular belief, models are a dime a dozen no matter where you live. Head on over to ModelMayhem.com and find a local model. Many of them will not even charge you if you give them copies of the pictures you take. It’s called TFP-time for prints. Oh, a warning on ModelMayhem… 90% of the models think their best pictures are when they are “disrobed.” I always have my wife go on the site and choose a model for me so I don’t have to see the nastiness. Not cool.
22. Buy a few scarves. My wife, Emily, made me include this tip for the ladies. She said it’s a great tip for dressing women for a portrait photography shoot, but I think it’s because she has an obsession with Confessions of a Shopaholic (the girl the green scarf). Anyway, it has worked wonders for me in the past. For $15 you can buy probably 10 scarves at any many stores. Then, you can have your female subjects wear plain colors (such as a white T-shirt and jeans) and then wear different colors of scarves. I found that this works GREAT for senior portraits, because teenage girls like “accessorizing” and changing clothes every five minutes. Big time saver and you’ll get many more looks out of one subject.
23. Raise that light for stunning catch lights. Catch lights are a type of specular highlight (the tiny bright spot on any shiny and round object). If you have no idea why catch-lights are cool, check out this article where I explain it. If you’re really picky, the best place to put a flash to get perfect catch-lights is high and a few feet to the side of the subject. This will create catch-lights at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock, which is optimal because then the catch-light doesn’t cover the pupil.
24. The worst way to get a “candid” expression from your subject. Whenever I go on a shoot, I always try and get an assistant that can help pose the subject and make them laugh and play so that I can focus on the photography. My pet peeve is when the assistant says something like, “You look so stiff! Loosen up!” Ugh! Telling the subject that they don’t look good only makes the situation ten times worse. Never tell the subject they look stiff or they need to loosen up. It backfires 100% of the time.
To have your subject framed, she doesn’t have to sit in the middle of the frame. This window frames the subject and still follows traditional rules of composition.
25. Use framing in a creative way. Have your model look through a window or have them lean up against a door frame and your portrait composition can look much stronger and more interesting. I like using this technique to take pictures of babies and toddlers by placing the child in a crib and having them peer through the bars of the crib at the camera. Always makes for a great shot. I’ve tried doing the same thing with people looking through prison bars, but it’s never been quite as flattering.
26. Try high-key or low-key lighting. Some photos look great overexposed for a clean and bright look, but the same model in the same pose can look scary and moody in low-key lighting. Learning to control the amount of light can make a huge difference in the feel of your photo.
27. Quit being a pansy. Many portrait photographers would love to get out and shoot more, but don’t have the opportunity to find models to shoot. Fortunately, any human can be a portrait model (although you probably want to find someone better looking than Scottie Pippen. Yikes). I was teaching a sunset portraiture class in Naples, Florida a few months back and no models were available for the shoot. Did I crawl into a fetal position and cry in the corner all afternoon? Yes, but that was for a different reason. Actually, we just asked random people on the beach if they wanted their pictures taken. By offering to email them the picture, we had tons of different people to practice on and got some fantastic shots.
28. Use ultra-wide lenses for a cool perspective. Shooting portraits with an ultra-wide lens can cause some serious problems if you don’t know how to do it correctly. Wide lenses generally distort facial features, which the subject will hate you for; however, check out this article on wide-angle portraits, and this article on using fisheye lenses creatively and you’ll be on the right track to capture awesome and unique portraits.
29. Warm that flash for sunset portraits. Sunset portraits are a favorite among portrait photographers, but few people do it right. A sunset is not daylight balanced. The light from a sunset is quite warm: red, yellow, and purple. Buy some gels and warm up that flash to make the picture look more natural.
Since the photographer is further away from the model, the photographer has to use a very low aperture to get shallow depth-of-field in this shot.
30. Crank that aperture for full-body portraits. I am shocked on almost a daily basis how many photographers fail to understand that aperture is not the only camera setting that impacts the depth-of-field. To learn the four (or five, depending on how you count) factors that impact depth of field, check out this article. When shooting a full-body portrait, the photographer is obviously further away from the subject. This means that the depth-of-field is much deeper. For full body portraits, remember that your aperture must be significantly lower (or your focal length significantly longer) to get a blurry background. To get shallow depth-of-field for full-body portraits, you might check out the 85mm f1.8 for Nikon, or the 85mm f/1.8 for Canon.