2 Quick Portrait Photography Tips

What ?! Portrait photography tips again?! I know how you feel when you see the title. It seems that I never get enough with portrait photography. How can I? It is my favorite subject and I love it a lot. It is alright that you don't see eye to eye with me on this. If you think you had enough with portrait photography, please come back later. I promise that I will share something different in my next post. Until then, let's enjoy the tips for portrait photography. J

1. Simplicity

Have you heard of the quote "Simplicity is beauty and beauty is simplicity, nothing more, nothing less."? (Author unknown)

And that says it all for portrait photography because the art is supposed to highlight the beauty of your subject (at least I think it is supposed to do that). You should make the picture as simple as possible and focus only on your subject. You should use a plain background whenever is possible and when you are force to take portraits with distracting background, you will want to blur the background as much as you can.

2. Back lighting

As a photographer, you probably know that back lighting is terrible for portrait photography during outdoor. Your subjects will appear dark in the pictures and they will lose their details in the pictures. For some of you, it might mean total failure on the portraits.

Still, it is possible to rectify the problem by flashing on your subjects. But if you have look at pictures done with that technique, you might feel that the subjects glow in a different and awkward vibe.

How do you rectify this? But my question to you is, why do you want to rectify that?

Back lighting can actually add interest and different feeling to the portraits when you do it right.

The next time when you are taking a portrait, try to find an angle where your subjects almost block the light source. This will create a picture with ray of light showering your subjects while keeping most of their details.

A word of caution when you are doing this is that sometime the ray might become a sudden glare to your eyes. So, it is good that you can look into the LCD when you are composing the shoot instead of looking directly to your subjects.

Happy taking pictures,

Michael Wong. :-)