Make your subjects look their best with our professional portrait photography tips, covering lighting setups, location scouting and tips for working with models.
When working in portrait photography, you have to create some sense of deliberateness to separate a casual photo from a portrait. Even the smallest details can make a difference. While using macro lenses for portrait photography isn’t something for everyone, when used correctly they can add sharpness you can’t find with other lenses. To help understand a […]
Mixing strobes with natural light is an exciting proposition. Bring in a few CTO (color temperature orange) gels and you have yourself a really fun working setup for environmental portraits. But why stop at that? Strobes are fun to use in bright outdoor conditions, as well. In this video, photographer Adam Angelides shows us how […]
How do you light a model with a beautiful golden skin tone, long black hair and wearing an earthly tone dress? If you think this is too specific, you’re right. But photography does make you a bit specific at times, especially when you have unique problems to tackle. A unique problem like Mark Wallace has […]
Lighting in portrait photography can be tricky, especially if you’re not in a studio setting or if you’re working by yourself. You don’t want to be lugging huge softboxes and extra equipment around everywhere. Or constantly stopping the shoot to move those softboxes around. In this case, a small, portable softbox can be a real […]
Fabrics, hats, animals, flowers and glasses are commonly used props for beauty portraits. They make the photo more interesting by giving the subject something to manipulate. Since beauty portraits involve only a subject, lighting and a prop, there’s more pressure on the model to express herself beautifully because she is the main focus of the […]
Photographing guys in a studio environment requires a much simpler lighting arrangement than when shooting women. With men, you can get away with things like deeper contrast and shadows across the face. In this video, Daniel Norton shares some invaluable tips to light up a male model inside a studio: Beauty Dish with Grid For the first lighting […]
If you’ve made the decision to start making money with your camera, you’ve probably figured out that the fastest way to do it is by offering headshots and portraits. Not just the artsy stuff. But the bread and butter work that helps pay the bills. That’s what this course is all about. We were able to […]
It may come as no surprise that student athletes tend to get at least one portrait taken in their uniform. However, to add a little extra oomph and creativity to the local basketball portraits, Erik Christian provided a whole new outlook for these All-Star players. To help show how he did it, Christian created this […]
How do you set up the perfect black and white portrait? Photographer Nathan Elson demonstrates some of his favorite lighting setups, using a mixture of large softboxes, gridded lights, and textured backgrounds. He also describes his thinking process: 1. Large Octagon Softbox For his first shot, Elson uses a large Octagon with a diffuser as his primary source of light. […]
Photographing two people in a studio environment presents a unique set of challenges. Two people, each wearing different colored clothing (black and white in this case), can be a nightmare for photographers trying to expose them properly. But when you know what you’re doing, you can really move things around and experiment and have a bit of […]
