"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.org)

This week you are to experiment with portrait photography, with the subject of your photographs being a single person.
Experiment with: Distance, whole or part body, angle, lighting, indoor outdoor, camera types and settings, shooting with and without a tripod, posed and candid styles, background colour, texture, depth of field.

Get to know your subject.

“Look for emotion and gesture if you're photographing people. Do they show happiness? Mischievousness? Sadness? Do they look thoughtful? Or do they just look like another person mildly annoyed to have a camera pointed at them? ” reference   18/7/12

Critique the portrait photography of professionals and amateurs. Discover why you like or do not like their images.

As you take photographs, use a notebook to keep a written record of your settings, setup and results

Try to see your subjects as your camera views them. Frame your shot before you press the button. Professional photographers rely almost solely on the quality of the original shot. They endevour to keep Post Processing of images to a minimum. Just crop and resize for your method of presentation.

A Guide: Taking Portrait Shots

Photographing a person is about capturing the personality of your subject, not just capturing their face. Get to know your subject.

Unless you have an elaborate studio setup, portraits are best taken in diffuse daylight outside.

Get your subject to relax around the camera. This takes time.

Remember the rule of thirds: aim to place eyes 1/3 from the top of the frame.

Remove distractions from the background. Put the background out of focus, and remove distracting objects, by changing your angle.

Check your focus is to the eyes, not the nose.

Avoid red eye (caused by flash reflection on the back of the retina, by using pre flash lighting, or natural ambient lighting.

Experimentation

The cost of experimentation with digital cameras is almost exactly zero. If you have time, try different and drastic angles, strange framing, zooming in "too close", and so on.

Composition: Framing a portrait photograph

Get rid of distractions from the background, either by changing the angle of your shot, or changing your aperture (f-stop) to blur the background (try f4)

Stunning Portraits & How To Capture Them
Composition
Tips

Camera settings for an indoor portrait

Use natural light from a nearby window

Use simple household lamps. Experiment with two lamps at different angles.

Use a high ISO (sensitivity), with a wide aperture (lessens the depth of field), and a fast shutter speed.

You could try the following exposure combination as a starting point and adjust according to your needs:

  • Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
  • Aperture:f/2.8 (or the widest possible for your lens)
  • ISO: 800
  • Shutter Speed (target): 1/60 sec. or faster

Post Processing of Portraits

"White Balance: Not all light sources produce the same color temperatures. Despite what they look like to our eyes, the camera will record various types of household lighting (florescent, tungsten, daylight balanced) and natural light (sunset, cloudy, shade) as producing different color casts. So, if you are shooting a portrait using a bright tungsten light as your subject’s main light, but you have a strong window light coming through in the background, you might have an undesirable color mix to deal with. Fortunately, you can correct these types of color mismatches in post-processing by making a general white balance setting choice in your software, and selectively altering the offending colors in specific parts of the image. If this isn’t something you’d like to worry about, then don’t. The colors might be acceptable just the way they are. If not, you always have artistic color altering effects and even black and white conversion options. So, it’s all good" reference

Composition and subject relationship are the two most important elements of portraits.

One thing that will help to remedy folks busting a pose as soon as you pull the camera out of the bag is to simply pull the camera out a lot more often. As people get more used to seeing you with a camera in your hand, they’ll become more natural whenever it comes out up to the point where they simply carry on as if nothing is going on.

Weekly Focus Tasks



Practical Portrait Task

Focus1: Portraits

Taking Great Portraits


  • Portraits
  • Post Processing Skills


    Editing, Restoring and Enhancing, Digital Images

    Composite Images
    Recursive Portraits
    Times Cover
  • Re-Touching Digital Images.
  • Adding in characters
  • Post Processing Skills
  • Online Links for Portrait Photography



    Take Great Portrait Photographs