Portrait photography for better photography

Portrait photography or portraiture is photography of a person or group of people that displays the expression, personality, and mood of the subject. Like other types of portraiture, the focus of the photograph is usually the person's face, although the entire body and the background or context may be included.<wikipedia>

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.

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.
here is the other tips
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.
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.

White Balance and Color temperature

White Balance

White Balance is an aspect of photography that many digital camera owners don’t understand or use – but it’s something well worth learning about as it can have a real impact upon the shots you take.

White balance (WB) is the process of removing unrealistic color casts, so that objects which appear white in person are rendered white in your photo. Proper camera white balance has to take into account the "color temperature" of a light source, which refers to the relative warmth or coolness of white light.

When examining shots after taking them that at times images can come out with an orange, blue, yellow etc. look to them – despite the fact that to the naked eye the scene looked quite normal. The reason for this is that images different sources of light have a different ‘color’ (or temperature) to them. Fluorescent lighting adds a bluish cast to photos whereas tungsten (incandescent/bulbs) lights add a yellowish tinge to photos.

We don’t generally notice this difference in temperature because our eyes adjust automatically for it. So unless the temperature of the light is very extreme a white sheet of paper will generally look white to us. However a digital camera doesn’t have the smarts to make these adjustments automatically and sometimes will need us to tell it how to treat different light.

So for cooler (blue or green) light you’ll tell the camera to warm things up and in warm light you’ll tell it to cool down.

Adjusting White Balance

Different digital cameras have different ways of adjusting white balance so ultimately you’ll need to get out your cameras manual out to work out the specifics of  how to make changes. Having said this – many digital cameras have automatic and semi-automatic modes to help you make the adjustments.
Modern digital cameras feature several white balance presets, as well as custom settings allowing photographer complete control over the white balance. Here we will cover them briefly and mention effects they have on photos.

  Daylight (approx. 5500 K): This white balance setting adjusts the digital camera to make colors appear natural when shooting in sunlit situations between about 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM (mid-day). Good thing to remember is when sun is lower in the sky with more red light, the scenes photographed using this setting will appear warmer than normally seen with our eyes. Also note that indoor scenes lit with incandescent lights (e.g. tungsten) will look very warm.

  Cloudy (approx. 6000 K): Even the symbol is cloud, think of this white balance setting as Cloudy/Twilight/Sunset setting. It warms up cloudy scenes as if you had  a warming filter, making sunlight appear warm, but not as much as the shade setting. You might also consider using cloudy setting for shooting people, as it will produce warm skin tones, with much more subtle effect than shade setting.

  Shade (approx. 8000 K): Used for shadowed objects under blue skies, removing the blue color cast. This setting is also used to warm up the scene, and can be used for same purposes as cloudy setting, but with much more pronounced effect. We suggest that you try out both settings, and see which you prefer.

  Tungsten Light (approx. 2700 K): The tungsten setting is designed to give natural results with quartz lights. It also reduces the strong orange color that is typical when photographing lamp-lit indoor scenes with daylight balanced settings. Since this control adds a cold tone to other conditions, it can be also used creatively for this purpose (e.g. make a snow scene bluer).

  Fluorescent Light (approx. 4200K, 5000K, 6500K): White balance setting to be used for fluorescent lights. Since the fluorescent lights usually appear green in photos, this setting adds magenta to neutralize that effect. Usually it comes in 3 settings for finer tuning. You can use this setting creatively, if you wish to add pinkish tones to your photos.

 Flash (approx. 5400 K): Lights from flash tend to be little “colder” than the daylight, so this white balance setting warms the scene a little bit up. It is very similar to cloudy setting, and can be used in similar conditions.

Manual White Balance Adjustments

In most cases you can get a pretty accurate result using the above preset white balance modes – but some digital cameras (most DSLRs and higher end point and shoots) allow for manual white balance adjustments also.

The way this is used varies a little between models but in essence what you do is to tell your camera what white looks like in a shot so that it has something as a reference point for deciding how other colors should look. You can do this by buying yourself a white (or grey) card which is specifically designed for this task – or you can find some other appropriately colored object around you to do the job.

white is white (not grey, bluish or yellow) etc. Now, the question is why and how would the latter even be possible? You see, our eyes are amazing photo-sensitive devices, and they adapt to not only the amount of light available (seeing in dark), but also to the ambient temperature of the light. The camera’s sensor though, is not so adaptable, and sometimes it needs our help on understanding how to process the photo. This effect is most pronounced in so-called mixed lighting conditions.

What is Color Temperature ?
The white balance scale is based on the thermodynamic scale of Kelvin ratings as illustrated on the figure below. According to this scale, every light source is assigned a color temperature. Lower color temperature values appear “warmer” (redder), while higher values produce “cooler” (bluer) cast to the photo.

So considering example photo above, if we set white balance to daylight setting (approx. 5500 K), and catch a tungsten light source – a lamp (approx. 2700 K), it will appear yellow-orange to our digital camera (as seen in first photo). Consequently, if we set white balance to Tungsten setting, and catch an object illuminated by daylight light source, the object will appear blue (see wall in mouse over photo).

In most cases, if the white balance is set to auto, the camera will take care of guessing which is the most appropriate setting, and most modern cameras do a decent job of it, however, taking manual control over white balance, opens a whole new range of creative possibilities.

Understanding the Depth of field and Focal length

What is Depth Of Field ?

Depth of field refers to the range of distance that appears acceptably sharp. It varies depending on camera type, aperture and focusing distance, although print size and viewing distance can also influence our perception of depth of field. The depth of field does not abruptly change from sharp to unsharp, but instead occurs as a gradual transition. In fact, everything immediately in front of or in back of the focusing distance begins to lose sharpness — even if this is not perceived by our eyes or by the resolution of the camera.

What is Focal length ?

The focal length of the lens is the distance between the lens and the image sensor when the subject is in focus, usually stated in millimeters (e.g., 28 mm, 50 mm, or 100 mm). In the case of zoom lenses, both the minimum and maximum focal lengths are stated.