Make your subjects look their best with our professional portrait photography tips, covering lighting setups, location scouting and tips for working with models.
Photography can be an expensive enterprise, especially when going for the perfect portrait shot. Most professional photographers (and many amateurs) use complex and expensive lighting setups for portraiture, yet it’s totally possible to capture great portraits using less equipment. In the video below, professional photographer Karl Taylor shows us how to do great portraiture with […]
Have you noticed how most portraits have the same, predictable, studio-lit look to them? In the video below, veteran photographer Joe McNally explains how to use speedlights to get portraits that will come out looking soft, glowing, and naturally-lit: McNally’s secret? Put a light in the direction the natural light would be coming from anyway. […]
Jay P. Morgan is well known for his awesome photography and lighting tutorials, and the video below is a good example of why. On a recent shoot at the Orange Empire Railway Museum in southern California, Morgan had the notion to mix HMI lights with LED lights and the results are fantastic: Morgan was already […]
Exactly how many times have you been advised to shoot in natural light? Probably too many times. And, yet, how many times have you struggled to get a good exposure while shooting in bright outdoor conditions? In this video, Lindsay Adler shows you exactly how to tackle that seemingly nightmarish midday lighting situation: If photographers […]
Gone are the days of generic, uniform student yearbook photos. It used to be that everyone got dressed up for picture day, sat on the same stool, made the same pose against the same tacky background, smiled the same smile. But today’s youth are bored with that. Students want to be seen for who they are; […]
Some people serve their country by holding a gun—others by holding a camera. Stacy Pearsall began as an Air Force photographer, but then she was wounded in action. She found herself in the hospital together with other vets and began taking their portraits. That’s when she discovered there was more to taking their portraits than […]
Although wide-angle lenses are ideal in many portrait situations, they may create undesirable distortion around edges of the frame. Why not experiment with other types of cameras and other formats, such as traditional film? Photographer Joe McNally explains how he used an old panoramic camera and beauty dish to push the boundaries with portraiture: Panoramic […]
There are countless light modifiers on the market designed for specific purposes. Photographer Andrea Belluso, however, goes outside the box and shows us how to be more creative with light-shaping tools. Here, he use the WideZoom Reflector, which is usually used to light backgrounds, as a main light and side light to create structure and unique, […]
Twisted or genuis? Call it whatever you like, but portrait photographer Patrick Hall‘s recent studio photo shoot idea to shock willing subjects with Tasers as a way to capture totally natural expressions is nothing if not effective: No, Hall isn’t a sadist—at least, not as far as we’re concerned. His idea to tase portrait subjects spawned from a desire […]
When shooting outdoors, the sun often creates overly bright highlights and harsh shadows on the skin. A good portrait photographer knows just what to pull out of his camera bag to help him combat this commonly overlooked aspect of outdoor photo shoots. Join Joe McNally as he shares his setup and lighting theory with us […]
