Portrait Photography for beginners

In this beginners guide to portrait photography we will look at a few basic techniques to get better results when photographing people. There are many ways improve your shots just by making a few minor adjustments to your settings and the positioning your subject.

Firstly you need to think about the light, harsh shadows can make your subject look very unflattering so choose a position where the light is good but not direct. If you are shooting indoors a great source of light is natural light coming through a window, try a choose a window where you won't get direct sunlight and position your subject to the side of the window to get some amazing shots.

For outdoor shots try finding a shady position where the light is still good but shadows are at a minimum, this will also cut down on your model squinting and give you a much better result.

Backgrounds are also an important factor in portrait photography, the last thing you need is a busy background that will distract you from the main subject. To overcome this we can use a few different methods, firstly you can buy a seamless background in many various colours and textures which are great for studio shots. The other alternative is to position your subject in an area where the background is quite neutral and there's not much going on. If all else fails use a shallow depth of field to blur the background and give some interesting results.

Zooming in on your subject and filling the whole frame can give you some quite dramatic results, you don't necessarily have to get a shot of the whole person. This also gives you the advantage of cutting out most or all of the background.

When taking photos of people or animals for that matter it's always best to shoot at eye level or even slightly below, it's not a good idea to shoot down on people, it just looks bad. So if you are taking photos of children get down to their level for a better shot.

Try and take candid shots of your subject to get a more natural feeling to the photo. Very often people hate having their photo taken and end up looking nervous with a cheesy grin, to overcome this try and catch them off guard, start by standing further away and zoom in this is better than pointing a camera straight into someone face, or try and catch them whilst they are distracted by something else.