Make your subjects look their best with our professional portrait photography tips, covering lighting setups, location scouting and tips for working with models.
Building your lighting arsenal requires just as much thought as choosing your camera body and lenses. You have to consider what environments you’ll be shooting in, how you’ll transport your equipment, and of course, the cost of everything vs. the return. That said, it can be difficult figuring out where to start. What is the […]
In a prior photo tip article, we started talking about lighting patterns in portrait photography. Today we’ll continue our lighting pattern discussion with split lighting. This photo lighting pattern tends to go against most of our portrait photography posing “rules.” We began our lighting patterns discussion by talking about broad lighting and short lighting. While […]
Impressing commercial clients involves scouting out unique locations and working expertly with lighting equipment. Photographers who go the extra mile are rewarded with clients who return to them again and again. With only three hours to to complete a commercial shoot in the darkness of an abandoned Tube station called Aldwych, photographer Chris Gale had […]
In a studio portrait session, it is sometimes difficult to position lights in order to achieve the photographer’s desired effect. When harsh shadows appear on one side of a model’s face, many photographers will set up a second light on the opposite side of the model as a fill light, but this only complicates the […]
If you think that professional-grade portrait lighting can only be achieved with multiple light sources, think again. Photographer Jay P. Morgan demonstrates the many looks that one can get from using only one light source coupled with multiple reflectors. In this instance, the lone light source is a Dynalite strobe head. He makes it look […]
Portrait photography or portraiture is photography of a person or group of people that displays the expression, personality, and mood of the subject. Like other types of portraiture, the focus of the photograph is usually the person’s face, although the entire body and the background or context may be included. You want to improve your […]
One problem (amongst many) in portrait photography is where to shoot from. Do you shoot at the subject’s eye level? Below? Above? Unfortunately, there’s no one single answer to this question. Your subject’s appearance will change drastically based on which angle you choose, and no one angle is good for every subject. If you’re not […]
School photography is a growing niche. The Western culture has started the trend of taking model-like photo shoots with all the glitz and glamour. Photographers have found this niche very rewarding, as there are thousands of children finishing their schooling every year. In many cities, large and small franchise studios have a monopoly on public […]
If you’ve never challenged yourself to recreate another photographer’s photo, you’re missing out on a priceless learning opportunity. The exercise forces you to dissect all elements of a photograph to figure out how it was made. In this humorous video, the DRTV team attempts to replicate Chase Jarvis’s Twitter profile picture, which was taken by […]
In portrait photography, lighting ratios are comparisons of the main light in a photo to the lesser light that fills in the shadows. This main light is known as the key light, and the lesser light is called the fill light. A lighting ratio can be expressed (K+F):F, where the main light is K+F because […]
