Education

6 Portrait Photography Tips for Beginners in 2020

When talking about portrait photography, you need to be extra careful. Capturing the stunning portraits is not an easy job but you can get expertise by clicking more and more images. Practice makes a man perfect and photography practice makes you a perfect photographer.

This article will discuss some portrait photography tips for beginners. If you follow these steps, you capture the amazing wedding or event portraits.

What is Portrait Photography

Portrait photography is a type of photography in which the photographer captures the personality of the object using different photography tools.

1. Lighting and Environment

You need to prepare yourself in advance while going for shoot. There are different camera settings for outdoor and indoor portrait photography.

Understanding the lighting will help you capture the quality portraits. If you are going for an indoor shoot, make sure to carry the necessary equipment with you.

We often need lighting and background for indoor photography. If you need any natural light, give it a try. Capture some portraits of your object and check the quality of images. If you find any issue with the quality of images, try artificial light.

If you are going to shoot outdoor portraits, make sure you are capturing the images at the perfect time of the day. Most of the photographers prefer to capture the outdoor in the evening.

You should also consider the direction of the sun with respect to the object. Avoid the direct light coming to the camera. Your object should be facing the sun. It will help in capturing the high-resolution image with clarity.

Early morning is also the best time to capture stunning portraits. Avoid capturing the images at midday if the weather is sunny.

2. Check out the Dynamics of Your Camera and Lens

Camera and lens plays the most significant role while capturing the portraits. You need to get expertise with the camera settings you are using. Understand the use of different focal lengths for specific purposes.

Capturing a headshot and full body required different approaches. You need to keep in mind the more an object is close to the camera the larger will be the size of the image.

While capturing a close up portrait the pronounced nose can create difficulty and you need to pay extra attention to get expertise in capturing the close up portraits. If you are using the Canon camera, check out the best canon lens for portraits and wedding photography.

3. Focus on Eyes

Eyes of the object play an important role in capturing the eye-catching portraits. You need to keep the eyes of the object in focus while capturing the portraits.

Some cameras have Eye AF features that allow tracking focus on the eye. You can also go for Flexible Spot AF point to place the focus right on the eye of the subject.

4. Change Angles

Try some unique angels. People are no more interest in traditional poses. You need to shoot the object from different angles to capture the unique portraits.

An effective way of capturing the more realistic image of your subject, you need to keep the focal length at 50mm or 700mm. Make sure the face of the subject is filling the frame. Most of the professional photographers use this technique to capture high-quality portraits.

5. Shoot in RAW and B&W

Uniqueness is the key to become a successful portrait photographer. Capture your images in monochrome or black and white to provide images with a more dramatic feel.

Try to use the RAW format instead of the general compressed JPEG. Clicking the images in Raw format produces “digital negative” that helps in preserving the image details which helps in capturing the high-resolution images.

You can easily edit the overexposed images if you are using the RAW format while shooting the image.

6. Get Yourself A Good Camera

If you are planning to turn your photography passion into a career, you need the best camera to capture high-quality images.

Before buying a professional photography camera you need to learn the working of the camera. There are different online classes available on the internet and you can join any class to get expertise in photography.

Once you understand the working of camera its time to search for the best camera that fulfills all of your requirements. My initial experiment with the camera was not so good.

I bought my first camera back in 2016 without proper research and it causes lots of difficulty for me. You need to go through proper research for selecting the best camera and lens.

The lens plays an important role in capturing stunning portraits. If you are using a kit lens with your camera, it will be really difficult for you to get the desired results.

Apart from the camera, buy some professional lights if you are planning to capture the indoor portrait photographs.

Conclusion

Getting expertise in portrait photography is a great challenge but you can get the expertise by constantly capturing the images.

Try some closeups and show it to the expert photographer in the community around you. They will better guide you where you are lagging behind. Try to improve your skills with each new photo captured by you.

You can also post your images in different photography groups on Facebook. My favorite platform to learn portrait photography is Reddit. You can ask your question and hundreds of photographers are there to help you improve your photography skills.

I hope these portrait photography tips for beginners would help you out in capturing the desired portraits. Feel free to share this article with people around you.

If you have any questions, please ask below!