The 8 Rules of a Portrait Photographer | Articles | Photo, video, optics

As we have just not­ed, the secret of a suc­cess­ful pho­to­graph is more than tech­ni­cal aspects, light and cam­era. It all starts with the inter­ac­tion between the mod­el and the pho­tog­ra­ph­er to cre­ate a com­fort­able atmos­phere for both. Typ­i­cal­ly, this involves some kind of explo­ration of your char­ac­ter, their inter­ests and per­son­al­i­ty. You should know every­thing from hob­bies, which can be a great con­ver­sa­tion starter, to spe­cif­ic fac­tors, such as favorite music, which can make a per­son relax, sing along or dance.

If you’re shoot­ing a per­son you don’t know yet, look at the rest of the por­traits you can find and be care­ful — every­one has favorite things, col­ors in clothes, pos­es, facial expres­sions, and even a good loca­tion when shoot­ing. And these are the things that you, as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, absolute­ly need to con­sid­er.

If you know a char­ac­ter or he trusts you, every­thing is also not so sim­ple — after all, even the most open peo­ple are some­times pinched and shy of the cam­era. There­fore, do not neglect the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate a pleas­ant envi­ron­ment in which the mod­el will be eas­i­er.

When the day of shoot­ing comes, you need to be pre­pared and have a clear plan — both for the envi­ron­ment and set­ting in which the por­trait will be shot, and for the set­tings with which you are going to shoot.

If you’re shoot­ing indoors or in a stu­dio, check out the avail­able options for back­grounds and indoor light­ing before­hand. Will it be pos­si­ble to use nat­ur­al light in the frame, or will you have to rely entire­ly on lamps and soft­box­es? Will clean walls be avail­able, or draperies that can be used as a back­drop, or will the inte­ri­or become the envi­ron­ment.

If shoot­ing out­doors using nat­ur­al light, con­sid­er the time of day, the direc­tion of the sun, and how and where you plan to posi­tion the mod­el. Always remem­ber that ear­ly morn­ing and mid-after­noon (2–3 hours) is the best time for por­traits with nat­ur­al light. But film­ing at noon, with the most harsh light and shad­ows, on the con­trary, is bet­ter to avoid. It’s a good rule of thumb to check weath­er fore­casts — cloudi­ness, for exam­ple, can help cre­ate a por­trait with soft shad­ows, like a nat­ur­al reflec­tor.

Ide­al­ly, the mod­el should be fac­ing the sun, or at such an angle that the light­ing accen­tu­ates the fea­tures, but, on the con­trary, smooths out unpleas­ant shad­ows. When com­pos­ing a por­trait, it is essen­tial to look behind the mod­el and note details such as dis­tract­ing back­grounds, objects that break the com­po­si­tion, and so on. While on the cam­era dis­play or in the viewfind­er, such things are easy to miss, so you just need to learn and get used to.

So that these words do not sound lengthy, we will explain them in more detail. When we take a pic­ture, we trans­fer a three-dimen­sion­al, 3d image into a flat 2d space. There­fore, depend­ing on the focal length and the posi­tion of the cam­era and lens, you can either empha­size or hide imper­fec­tions. And of course, this will be reflect­ed in the final pic­ture. The num­ber of indi­vid­ual char­ac­ter­is­tics of each of the mil­lions of faces is lim­it­less: it can be bright eye­brows, spe­cif­ic noses, dou­ble chins and much more. From this it may seem that it is almost impos­si­ble to take a per­fect or even suc­cess­ful shot, but this is not at all the case. It is with the help of the loca­tion of the cam­era rel­a­tive to the mod­el that you can choose the most suc­cess­ful angle.

Depend­ing on whether you want to shoot a por­trait from a clos­er dis­tance, you want to cre­ate a beau­ty shot, or you want to cap­ture a char­ac­ter in a nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment doing what they love, you will have to choose the approach to shoot­ing. Espe­cial­ly when shoot­ing por­traits, it must be tak­en into account that the object or part of the face that is clos­est to the lens will appear larg­er than the rest. This effect is even more pro­nounced when using a wide-angle lens. There­fore, when shoot­ing por­traits, wide angles are not rec­om­mend­ed.

Again, this char­ac­ter­is­tic needs atten­tion when shoot­ing char­ac­ters with spe­cif­ic large noses. The longer the focus of the lens, the flat­ter and more com­pressed the ele­ments will appear. The face, in this case, will be rounder, and the nose — short­er and more har­mo­nious. That is, a tele­pho­to lens with a focal length of 200mm, locat­ed a lit­tle fur­ther, but aimed direct­ly at the face of the mod­el, will cre­ate a more pleas­ant effect than a reg­u­lar 85mm por­trait lens.

The eyes are not with­out rea­son called the mir­ror of the soul, in por­trait pho­tog­ra­phy a lot can be con­veyed through the look of the char­ac­ter, there­fore, when shoot­ing, often atten­tion and empha­sis is placed on the eyes. Sim­i­lar­ly, focus is impor­tant — if the image is clear and bright, but the eyes are out of focus, the essence of the pic­ture is lost.

With the help of a glance, you can con­vey both the mood and the idea of ​​​​the frame, thanks to its direc­tion, you can build a com­po­si­tion. In short, the pos­si­bil­i­ties are only lim­it­ed by the imag­i­na­tion of the pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

Sony cam­eras have a very handy fea­ture — ‑Eye AF, which allows you to focus on the eyes of the char­ac­ter. In addi­tion, flex­i­ble focus points can be used to posi­tion the focus on the eye. Thus, regard­less of the depth of field, the eyes are always in focus.

Pho­tos can tell a sto­ry, and even if you like clas­sic por­traits, some­times you can push the bound­aries. Around the char­ac­ter there is always an envi­ron­ment that can also be used. Thus, by zoom­ing in and out, mov­ing fur­ther and mov­ing clos­er, you can change the mood and atmos­phere of the frame.

If you are pho­tograph­ing chil­dren, for exam­ple, you should not do this from the height of your own height. On the con­trary, by shoot­ing them from their lev­el, you can achieve a greater effect of real­ism, con­vey their per­son­al­i­ty and make the pho­to more per­son­al. The same thing works with adults — look­ing at a per­son at their own height is one of the tricks that will help you anchor your own psy­cho­log­i­cal con­nec­tion with the char­ac­ter in the frame and reflect his per­son­al­i­ty.

If you want to achieve a spe­cial effect, you can shoot from below, and from above, and from the side — every­thing will depend only on what kind of sto­ry you are try­ing to tell.

The tone and appear­ance of your sub­jec­t’s skin plays a very impor­tant role when cre­at­ing a por­trait. Appear­ances are deceiv­ing to the untrained eye, so a cam­er­a’s white bal­ance can eas­i­ly be deceived by the sur­round­ings. Reflec­tions from walls, cloth­ing or green­ery, even day­light, can make all the dif­fer­ence in bal­anc­ing a shot. There­fore, you should not com­plete­ly rely on the auto-bal­ance of the cam­era — a mis­take can cost time and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

You should always have white bal­ance cards, fil­ters, and cal­i­bra­tion tools in your arse­nal. They will help to build the right bal­ance in any sit­u­a­tion.

If you’re work­ing in low light con­di­tions but still want your char­ac­ter to stand out, the avail­able light can be realigned to match them with a col­lapsi­ble reflec­tor. The reflec­tors are avail­able in white, sil­ver, gold or black, and we have already writ­ten about their specifics in more detail.

Feel free to use their capa­bil­i­ties when shoot­ing por­traits.

In sit­u­a­tions where the avail­able light­ing does not allow for a pleas­ing white bal­ance, a com­plete­ly afford­able option is to con­vert the image to black and white. It also adds a vin­tage effect to the por­trait. In addi­tion, in a black and white frame, the back­ground col­ors will not dis­tract atten­tion from the empha­sized out­line of the char­ac­ter at all. That is, all atten­tion will be focused on it. You can shoot a por­trait in col­or in RAW, and con­vert it to black and white after, this will make it pos­si­ble to fur­ther twist the set­tings and achieve the desired effect. In this case, you can con­nect cre­ativ­i­ty and empha­size every­thing that will give the char­ac­ter char­ac­ter.

We often say that RAW is the most ben­e­fi­cial for­mat for shoot­ing. No mat­ter what type of footage you’re aim­ing to cap­ture, this for­mat will allow you to achieve the best qual­i­ty and more oppor­tu­ni­ties in post-pro­cess­ing. They weigh more than oth­ers and will require more free space on the mem­o­ry card, but the ben­e­fits in this case great­ly out­weigh.

In essence, RAW files can be described as a kind of neg­a­tives of film pho­tographs. Once you down­load them direct­ly from your cam­era, you can edit them to add con­trast, pull col­ors, tone, and more with­out affect­ing the orig­i­nal. The JPEG for­mat that all cam­eras shoot is a com­pressed for­mat in which the qual­i­ty is reduced. And with qual­i­ty, impor­tant infor­ma­tion is lost. For tasks such as social net­works, for exam­ple, JPEG pho­tos are more than enough, although it is worth remem­ber­ing that every time we reduce and change such a frame, we lose data. So, if we are talk­ing about seri­ous pho­tog­ra­phy, about albums, print­ing, and so on, we mean that the work will begin with a RAW pho­to.