Make your subjects look their best with our professional portrait photography tips, covering lighting setups, location scouting and tips for working with models.
Low key portraiture is all about light and shadow control. You need to understand light to do it. Lindsay Adler provides a useful tutorial: What is Low Key Lighting? Low key portraits utilize dark backgrounds, shadows, and low light. The resulting images tend to be dramatic with high contrast. Inverse Square Law Knowing how light […]
Posing is as integral to portrait photography as the right lens and the right camera angle. A lot of photographers learn this the hard way. If you’re a portrait photographer or do family and wedding photography you know how important posing can be. In this video tutorial, photographer Julia Kelleher demystifies the art and science […]
Have you ever looked at some of the amazing portraiture on the cover of Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair and wondered how it was done? You may not have heard of Mark Seliger, but you’ve certainly seen some of his work. Actors, musicians—even presidents—have had their portraits taken by him. Iconic images like the nude […]
As portrait photographers, it’s our job to capture our subjects’ true emotions, but we all know that can be more easily said than done. This short and sweet video reveals a tiny secret about spotting a fake smile that could help you create better portraits: Did you guess the “real” smiles correctly? If so, you’re […]
If you’re someone who likes to shoot dramatic portraits on location, but you don’t want to be weighed down by a lot of lighting equipment and don’t have an assistant, the folks at The Slanted Lens just might have a winning solution for you. Check out this one light set-up photographer Jay P. Morgan uses […]
Photographer Jeffrey Salter loves two things: his motorcycle and photography. Why? Because both activities cause him to experience wind-in-his-hair freedom. Photography, in particular, gives Salter the opportunity to relate to many different types of people and to creatively express his soul and the souls of his subjects in new and compelling ways—but for a vast majority of professional […]
It’s no secret that traditional agriculture has long been dying out in the United States, replaced by factory farms and microwave dinners. The Great American Frontier is disappearing, and that’s why Tyler Stableford‘s photography project on farmers and ranchers in western Colorado is so important: “The Farmers” started out as a simple vision for a fine art […]
Strip softboxes are well known tools in the product photography world, particularly for placing highlights, but what about using them for dramatic portraiture? Check out how fashion and beauty photographer Andrea Belluso brings about a largely in-camera dramatic double-portrait using his Profoto RFi strip softboxes: Unlike standard softboxes, strip softboxes have a narrow, rectangular shape […]
Edward Steichen once said that “a portrait is not made in the camera, but on either side of it.” Clare Fieseler, a doctoral student in the Curriculum for the Environment and Ecology program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who has previously worked for National Geographic, is living this quote by using her experience […]
Do you hate getting your photo taken? When you do, do you look at the image and find a bunch of things you hate—do you see your big nose, double chin, round face? The thing is, you see something in yourself that others don’t. And you need to get past it. You need to find […]
