4 Things I Hate About Portrait Photography Now
I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today, and I want to talk about 4 things I truly hate about portrait photography in 2019.
I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today, and I want to talk about 4 things I truly hate about portrait photography in 2019.
If you have a fast and expensive lens, it may feel like a waste to shoot portraits stopped down to f/8, f/11, or f/16. But in this 20-minute video, photographer Miguel Quiles explains why he often opts to shoot stopped down instead of wide open for increased depth of field and finer details and textures.
Your actor headshots, combined with your actor showreel, are the foundations of your actor profile. They are without a doubt a key marketing tool for your acting career. It’s important to prepare yourself in order to get the most out of your session.
I am an experienced corporate/commercial photographer, and I've written this article to help guide my clients into how to prepare for a headshot or portrait session. Most people don't like having their photograph taken, they find it awkward or can't stop thinking about one of their perceived weaknesses.
How far would you go to set up the scene of your dreams for the perfect wedding day photo shoot? Photographer Priscila Valentina was recently hired by a guy named Samuel whose grand romantic gesture was to spend a morning pushing a piano through the streets of Paris and up to the Eiffel Tower.
Bhutan is a small landlocked country in the Eastern Himalayas of South Asia located between Tibet and India. Photographer Andrew Studer of Portland, Oregon, traveled to the country in 2017 and 2018 and spent weeks shooting photos of the places and people he encountered. His project is titled, "Faces of Bhutan."
Photographer Miguel Quiles made this 7-minute video tutorial on a trick you can use to shoot eye-catching portraits. It's all about paying attention to and manipulating the catchlights in your subject's eyes.
Portraiture has never been a genre that resonated with me as a creator, which is odd because there are many examples of portraiture that I enjoy, and I’d absolutely love to be able to create meaningful portraits of people in the same way that I feel I’m able to create meaningful images in other genres.
Want to up your portrait game? Here's a video by B&H in which Naew York City-based portrait photographer Peter Hurley shares 5 headshot tips in about 3 minutes.
I am a fan of light (honestly what photographer isn’t?). Hard light; reflected light; dappled light; low-key light; colored light -- I love it all. Light makes or breaks not only my images but my mood. I’d venture to say that light is sandwiched between “belonging” and “safety” on my hierarchical pyramid of needs.
Dina Alfasi is a mother in Israel who commutes to her architectural engineering job at a hospital. Whether she's walking or riding a bus, train, or airplane, Alfasi is always ready with her iPhone to capture life's beautiful little moments.
New York photographer Justin Borucki has been documenting his city with a pop-up tintype studio out of the back of his car. While shooting a portrait for a client recently, Borucki unexpectedly captured a beautiful leaf-like pattern across the photo due to the frigid wind chill causing ice crystals to form.
Here’s a simple breakdown of 7 different lighting techniques you can implement next time you shoot portraits with studio lighting. For these examples, we used continuous lights to better illustrate it, but you can strobes as well, of course.
For my latest project, titled RAW, I shot a series of UV portraits revealing the true appearance beyond the visible. Composed of twenty photographs divided into ten diptychs, the series illustrates the raw and natural character of the human being, revealed by the technique of ultraviolet photography.
Photographer Tommy Corey spent months thru-hiking the 2,653-mile Pacific Crest Trail that spans California, Oregon, and Washington. Along the way, he photographed his fellow long-distance hikers as though they were high-fashion models. The project is called Hiker Trash Vogue, and Corey's beautiful 7-minute video above tells the story of how it came to be.
In this video and article, we will teach you 5 inexpensive lens hacks in under 5 minutes using the Canon EOS R and a Canon 50mm f/1.8 II.
If you don't have access to a full cyclorama wall or large studio, you're in luck. In this 2-minute video, I'll teach you how to create a pure white background and light the subject using a single light source.
I like to be very aware of my influencers and the effect they have on my work. When I find that I particularly like an image from another photographer, I will give it a lot of thought before I try and apply any of my analysis to my own images.
It’s not often I get to shoot very simple, clean white light shots, but in a recent shoot the model asked if she could get some updated ‘Polaroids’. For those of you not familiar with the term when used in reference to a model shoot, it’s actually not the now-obsolete and ludicrously expensive single-shot film, but a request for very basic portraits of the model for their agency.
Sometimes, you’re forced to work with what you’ve got, even if that means just the flashlight on your phone. In this 10-minute video, you’ll learn 5 ways to light portraits using just a phone flashlight.
Want to learn how to get your portrait subjects to give you the poses and expressions you're going for? Photographer Miguel Quiles made this helpful 11-minute video in which he shares one of his best tricks: getting subjects to play a character.
If you're looking to expand your skill set in shooting portraits with umbrellas, check out this 8-minute video by photographer Miguel Quiles. In it, he introduces different types of umbrellas and then shares 5 different ways he uses them to create stunning portraits.
I’ve been photographing weddings for 10 years now, so I’ve seen and dealt with nearly every lighting scenario possible, from a dark church with no windows, to a wedding ceremony at high noon with not a cloud in sight. But one thing most photographers don’t know is how to photograph in dappled light!
If you shoot a portrait and your subject is blushing or has red patches on their skin for whatever reason, removing the coloration is quick and easy in Photoshop. This 1-minute Photoshop tutorial by PiXimperfect shows how it's done.
Finding new ways to create isn't always easy, so you have to keep your eyes open for inspiration. One day while making my way down the rabbit hole of YouTube, I stumbled across a video. These guys had created 3 colored shadows off this pencil while keeping a perfectly white background. What in the world was this sorcery? Turns out it wasn't sorcery, it was science.
On January 17 of this year, I suddenly found myself in a terrifying, all-too-real nightmare. I was standing on the edge of a frozen lake near my home on Mount Desert Island, Maine. In front of me were snowmobile tracks that disappeared into the blackness of the frigid night. I knew that my 13-year-old daughter, Jolie, was a passenger on that snowmobile; and I had just received word from local firefighters that the tracks ended in open water.
For a long time, I have been building sets or props for my images, which in time developed into making and selling furniture as a hobby business. I thought it about time I made videos detailing the process of those builds and the “high budget” results that can be achieved with little financial outlay and a little DIY.
When it comes to online educational content, there aren’t many photographers out there willing to share their mistakes when trying to create a photo. I think it’s fair to say that there are easily far more who only share their best work online and for good reason; as educators, you want to create an image of a photographer who makes little to no mistakes at all.
Everyone has been taught from birth how to get a kid to smile. You just tell them to say "cheese" and they respond with a nice big natural smile, right? Well, anyone that's actually tried this can testify to how well it works (if you didn't catch my sarcasm... it doesn't). You end up with a photo of a kid with clenched teeth, a scrunched nose, and raised eyebrows.
Suzanne Jongmans creates Renaissance-style portraits that have an unusual twist: look a little more closely and you'll notice that each of her costumes was made using used packing materials such as styrofoam and bubble wrap.