Turning a so-so portrait into a pretty stunning one doesn’t take much effort.
You don’t need an expensive collection of home studio lights and an extensive bank of Photoshop tricks to get brilliant results; a short telephoto lens, a reflector and a flashgun – along with a few simple tried and tested techniques – will go a long way to transforming your people pictures.
In their latest guest blog post, the team at the photo management blog Photoventure offers a selection of 11 Dos and Don’ts for taking natural-looking portraits to be proud of…
1. Don’t… expect to take a stunning portrait using harsh, overhead sunlight
Shooting a portrait outdoors in the glare of a midday sun won’t produce the most flattering results. The strong lighting directly overhead creates deep shadows around eyes and under the chin and the nose, and you’re likely to end up with bright hotspots across the cheeks and forehead.
Instead of trying to take a photo of someone squinting in harsh sunlight, find an area in shadow instead. The light will be softer and produce a more even illumination across their face. Colours will appear cooler, but you can fix that with the camera’s white balance setting.
Alternatively, ask your model to turn their back to the sun, and use a reflector or fill-in flash to reveal facial details that are lost in shadow.
2. Do… use a reflector for natural light photography
A reflector is an essential part of the portrait photographer’s kitbag. It can help you to remove ugly shadows and take beautifully balanced pictures in tricky lighting conditions.
It’s a great option for window-lit indoor portraits too. Ask the model to sit close to the window and hold the reflector on the opposite side of their face for a simple but effective Rembrandt lighting set-up. A reflector also kicks back a surprising amount of light, giving you faster shutter speeds to work with and consequently improves your chances of taking pin-sharp photos.
There are plenty of commercially available reflectors, ranging in size, colour and shape. Popular colours for portraits are white, silver and gold. White reflectors offer a soft amount of fill light that’s easy to blend with natural light, while silver reflectors add crispness. Gold reflectors bring a touch of warmth to skin tones, although the effect can be too strong if the reflector is held too close to the model.
When it comes to reflectors, bigger is generally better, as the light will obviously be spread over a wider area and the result will look more natural. The circular shape of popular reflectors can make them awkward to handle though, so persuading someone to be your assistant for the shoot can help!
You don’t have to splash out on a commercial reflector – you can make your own DIY reflector using something as simple as a sheet of white card, or a white bedsheet. Even a large piece of kitchen foil, scrunched into a ball and then flattened out again, provides a great makeshift reflector.
3. Don’t… use on-camera flash
Like the sun on a clear summer’s day, flash is a small, directional point-source of light relative to the subject. This creates distracting hard shadows and hotspots on the skin. If your model is close to the background, they’ll cast a shadow across it, too.
You may also end up with the infamous red-eye problem, but this is dead-easy to fix in image-editing software. Even so, wouldn’t you prefer to get the best results straight out of the camera?
For more flattering flash porttraits, switch to using an off-camera flashgun. You’ll need a remote camera cord to maintain the electrical contact with the camera’s hotshoe. Alternatively, you can trigger the flashgun wirelessly with compatible cameras and accessories.
Using a flashgun remotely enables you to move the light away from the axis of the lens. This removes the threat of red-eye and gives you more control over where shadows fall. As with natural light portraits, a reflector held on the opposite side of the model can be used to bounce light back and provide more balanced illumination.
There are various softbox-style attachments that you can add to a flashgun to soften its effects, although angling the flash head towards a white ceiling or wall will spread the light over a wider area.
Many flashguns enable you to rotate the flash head upwards, so you can bounce the flash when it’s attached to the hotshoe. They usually include a pull-up bounce card too, which can be used to send some light towards the subject to provide catchlights in the eyes. Eyes without catchlights will look as lifeless as a shark’s…
4. Do… use longer lenses for portraits
Don’t use a wide-angle lens – anything wider than 35mm will create distorted caricature-like portraits when they’re used up close.
Even a standard 50mm lens can produce a distorted portrait when used for a tight head-shot, with the nose and other features close to the camera looking larger in comparison with everything else. A 50mm lens will be fine for 3/4 shots taken from further away, though.
Lenses of 70mm and longer are the preferred choice for flattering close-ups of people, with an 85mm f/1.8 lens being the go-to portrait lens for many photographers shooting with full-frame cameras.
If you’re using a camera with a smaller APS-C sensor, than an 85mm lens will give an equivalent view to a 135mm lens on a full-frame camera. If space is restricted, switch to a 55mm lens instead.
5. Don’t… select very small apertures
Small apertures increase the depth of field, bringing more of a scene into sharp focus. With portrait photography, you generally want the background to melt away.
Portrait photographers tend to prefer lenses with wide maximum apertures, such as f/1.8, f/1.4 and f/1.2 for this reason. Shooting at these apertures will soften foreground and background details and allow viewer’s to focus on the most important feature – that’s usually the subject’s eyes.
Wide apertures like these also exaggerate out-of-focus highlights in a picture, creating (usually) attractive, diffuse, rounded shapes. The smoother the blur, or the ‘creamier the bokeh‘, the more ‘professional’ your portraits will look.
6. Do… use a step ladder
Although good portrait advice is to shoot from the model’s eye-level, getting higher up and shooting down can often produce a better image when you’re shooting outdoors.
As well as being able to use the ground as a backdrop – portraits look less than stunning when the horizon is slicing the image in half – it also encourages the model to look through their eyelashes, an effective trick if you’re trying to create a more alluring mood.
7. Don’t… stop talking to your model
The best light and lenses might help you create a technically stunning portrait, but if the model is frozen to the spot, caught like a rabbit caught in the headlights, then your picture will leave viewers cold.
To run a portrait session successfully, you need to work up a rapport with your model. Keep chatting to them, crack some jokes, have fun – do anything to help them relax. The worst thing you can do is clam up.
Although shooting portraits handheld frees you up to quickly adjust the framing and composition, try shooting with the camera attached to a tripod instead. Trip the shutter with a remote release and talk to the subject without looking through the viewfinder. Making the camera essentially invisible can help to put nervous sitter at ease.
8. Do… add some props
The right prop can liven up a portrait. It gives the portrait-sitter something to interact with, helping them to relax – and helping you to explore new poses.
A portrait prop can be something as simple as hat or a pair of glasses or as cheesy as a toy gun or umbrella – raid your house to find colourful items that will add interest.
Consider furniture too. As a rule, people find it more awkward trying to pull a decent pose when they’re standing bolt upright. Getting them to sit down or to lean on something will make for a more natural look.
9. Don’t… create plastic skin in Photoshop
It’s easy to get carried away when editing portraits in Photoshop. But removing all blemishes and softening skin tone to the point where there’s little texture left can leave you with a portrait that’s as plastic-looking as a shop window dummy.
In general you want to keep portrait retouching as light as possible. Clone out obvious spots and blemishes by all means, but don’t remove all detail from a person’s skin. Use the Dodge tool set to Midtones to lift darker areas around the eyes and nose – but make use several strokes with the Exposure setting at a very low level – say 5% – rather than one swipe at 15%.
10. Do… brighten eyes and teeth
A small tweak that goes a long way to making a portrait look stunning is to touch up the eyes and teeth. As with skin retouching, it requires subtlety if you don’t want to be left with an unnatural result.
Use the Dodge tool, choose Highlights and an Exposure setting of 6%, then run a soft brush over the whites of the eyes and teeth.
After that, use the Burn tool with Shadows selected and the same Exposure setting to add depth to the pupil and eyelashes.
11. Don’t… be too generous when it comes to portrait sharpening
Unlike landscape or still life photography, where you can generally be quite liberal with sharpening, when it comes to portraits you need to go easy.
Creating a warts-and-all character portrait is one thing, but no portrait-sitter expecting a stunning image is going to thank you if they count every wrinkle and blemish.
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