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The Importance Of Portrait Photography

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These are my best tips to help you to improve your portrait photography but remember that these aren't rules, consider them more like guidelines. A great photographer always breaks a few rules once he knows them.
High aperture & reduce clutter

When you shoot a portrait you can make the photograph more focused by using a high aperture (small f-stop) like 2.0, 2.5 or 2.8. This will cause the focus to be on the person and in turn blur out the background. This makes the viewer focus on the person and effectively removes clutter from the photo. Also, as a bonus, this will help you shoot in lower light and thus getting sharper images. However, be aware that apertures of 1.2 - 1.8 might give you problems placing the focus correctly since it's …show more content…

Reason being that I don't want to miss that perfect moment. But this doesn't mean that I always go flexible on the lights. Sometimes I do use studio lights or just create my own little studio. Either way, when it comes to lighting a subject, soft lighting tend to be more flattering and hard light tends to bring out flaws because of its harsh shadows that makes wrinkles and such pop. On that note - never, ever, photograph with a flash on top of your camera straight ahead without a second light source. Pop-up flashes are horrible and you will always benefit more from using natural light, reposition your subject, use a more light sensitive lens or just raise the ISO. Knowing light is a massive knowledge, but studying it will pay off since it's the building block of the photograph. For instance, I was going to shoot a cover for a CD single to an musician and I ended up photographing him on a bench, in a sauna, with two speedlites where one of them where strung up with a GorillaPod around a tube, pointing down. You can see the results here on my photography site or on this portrait photography link [http://www.mikaelcedergren.com/projects/ice-steel-cd-cover/]. It's kinda hard to believe those wheren't shot in a

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