Make your subjects look their best with our professional portrait photography tips, covering lighting setups, location scouting and tips for working with models.
If you’re into portrait photography you know that shooting indoors and outdoors requires slightly different approaches. If you’ve been shooting indoors mostly, you may have struggled initially when making the transition to an outdoor setup. The trick is in knowing what to expose for, using the ambient lighting to good effect, and using an external light to complement […]
Afternoon sunlight doesn’t have to be harsh. It can actually enhance the beauty of outdoor photos by being turned into a soft keylight. Photographer Jay P. Morgan shows us how to do this when shooting a human model here: Morgan uses a translucent reflector that can be held up toward the human subject. With help from […]
Capturing an authentic image of someone on the street is not a very easy thing to do. To really capture their soul—an honest moment of someone looking straight into the camera and revealing themselves—that’s magic. Photographer Kenna Klosterman uses travel street portraiture to really connect with a culture and its people while she’s traveling. Here are […]
In this video, Daniel Norton from Adorama demonstrates four different ways of photographing a face. Just changing the position of the lights can completely change the way your model looks in an image. For this experiment, Norton sets up four Profoto B1 lights: one each on camera right and left, one above the model’s face, and one […]
As photographers, we’ve all probably suffered from lens envy at some point or another. It’s not uncommon for a good portrait lens to cost more than a camera body, and most of us just don’t have that kind of budget. The good news is that it’s entirely possible to shoot amazing photos with the kit lens […]
An epic journey calls for an epic photograph. This jaw-dropping portrait was taken by staff of Mammut after their climb to a 4,158 meter summit of the Jungfrau. The Jungfrau is one of the main summits located in the Bernese Alps of Switzerland: The photograph was taken for the Mammut summer campaign, which marked the […]
It’s becoming common practice to retouch the imperfections and blemishes that are found on everyone’s faces and skin. However, it’s sometimes easy to get carried away in editing and before you know it, your subject begins to look plastic and barely resembles their actual look. In the video below, Lee Varis, explains the process he […]
When shooting a portrait, the conventional wisdom involves using bright, evenly-coloured light to bring out the model’s sweet inner glow. Sometimes, though, you might desire an aesthetic that is a little bit more dramatic. In this video, Detroit photographer Paul Manoian uses coloured gels to shed light on the darker side of portrait photography: Manoian […]
Complex photo shoots call for complex lighting. That’s why Jay P. Morgan shows us exactly how he sets up his seven different lights for this shoot, which features Jodie Sweetin (of Full House fame) posing as a beauty queen in a disaster kitchen. Here’s how he does it: The idea for this photo shoot began with Sweetin, who […]
We have seen storm-chasing photographers make awe-inspiring timelapses. We’ve seen photographers make mesmerizing natural light portraits, too. However, we haven’t often seen a photographer attempting to chasing bad weather just so that he can make portraits. But if that photographer is Ben Von Wong, then there must be a reason behind the insanity: “I think that we […]
