Shooting good portraits

The per­fect por­trait doesn’t exist because there is always some­one that won’t like it ;)
That said, there are a few basic tips that can help you get more inter­est­ing and more flat­ter­ing portraits.


~ Watch which way your light­ing is com­ing in and check the qual­ity of the light. Softer dif­fused light is a much bet­ter light for flat­ter­ing por­traits than harsh direct light. Although back­light is amaz­ing for dra­matic inter­est­ing por­traits, it’s harder to work with espe­cially for some­one newer to pho­tog­ra­phy. Using front light, side­light, and 3/4 light along with fill light from a sec­ondary flash‚ or reflec­tor will bring your por­trait skills up a notch.
~ Adjust your aper­ture so that the back­ground blurs out a bit and more focus is placed on your sub­ject.
~ Alter your per­spec­tive by tak­ing the shot from a dif­fer­ent angle rather than eye level. This can really change the ‘wow’ fac­tor of your photo.
~‚ Play with eye con­tact — it does won­ders to a pho­to­graph when your subject’s focus is on some­thing else.

Shoot­ing the per­fect por­trait may seem daunt­ing, but keep­ing use­ful tips in mind when doing so will make por­trait pho­tog­ra­phy a ‘snap’.

More tips can be found at: http://www.photography.ca/Forums/showthread.php?t=2393

65 — Color casts — correcting color casts — Interview with Dominic Fuizzotto

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #65 fea­tures an inter­view with Mon­treal Wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher Dominic Fuiz­zotto. In the inter­view we talk about why colour casts hap­pen and how to cor­rect colour casts.‚ When images have a colour cast they usu­ally just don’t look right and it is our job as pho­tog­ra­phers to get rid of bad colour casts.

The image at left has a strong yellow/orange cast. We easily see the cast in the brides dress which is white. The cast is removed in the photo on the right and the brides dress is now white. Image by Dominic Fuizzotto

The image at left has a strong yellow/orange cast. We see the cast in the bride’s dress which is NOT white. The cast is removed in the photo on the right and the bride’s dress is now white. Thanks to Dominic Fuiz­zotto for these examples.

One IMPORTANT thing that I for­got to men­tion in the pod­cast is that on the rare occa­sion you may actu­ally WANT to intro­duce a colour cast into an image as in the photo below. This can be done eas­ily in Pho­to­shop but it can also be done by using gels on lights or by set­ting your camera’s white bal­ance to the wrong set­ting on purpose.

This image has a delib­er­ate green/yellow cast. Most times you don’t want this but some­times like in this shot, it works and adds to the shot.

The colour wheel in photography

The colour wheel in photography


This is the colour wheel that most pho­tog­ra­phers use whether they know it or not.‚ White light is made of red, green and blue light. The com­pli­men­tary or oppo­site colours of red, green and blue are cyan, magenta and yel­low respec­tively. In order to reduce a colour cast, we need to intro­duce its oppo­site into the image.‚ There­fore, if an image has a blue cast we reduce that cast by adding yel­low into the image.

Links men­tioned in this pod­cast:
Dominic Fuiz­zotto Pho­tog­ra­phy
April’s por­trait assign­ment on the Photography.ca forum

If you are still lurk­ing on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly :) Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

Thanks as always to every­one that sent com­ments by email about our last pod­cast. Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Thanks as well to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. I Sub­scribe with iTunes I Sub­scribe via RSS feed I Sub­scribe with Google Reader I Sub­scribe for free to the Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast — Photography.ca and get all the posts/podcasts by Email
You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.

Thoughts on Borders

When we print out pho­tographs or pur­chase pieces of art on can­vas, we gen­er­ally get these art pieces framed to ‘fin­ish’ the look. Well how about pho­tographs posted online? Many peo­ple are now post­ing their pho­tographs online with a bor­der to com­ple­ment the piece. But does it really complement?


Some might feel that bor­ders are dis­tract­ing to the visual ele­ments in the photo. A bor­der can fur­ther destroy a photo if it’s too over­whelm­ing to the sub­ject at hand.

Oth­ers can’t do with­out the bor­ders; they serve to help make the photo ‘pop’, make the photo a tad more ele­gant, or depend­ing on the color and con­text of the photo, can also com­ple­ment the ele­ments in the photograph.

Just as every pho­tog­ra­pher has their own tastes in their photo sub­jects, they also have their own opin­ions on bor­ders as a cre­ative ele­ment. Essen­tially, it’s all up to the artist and how they feel their cre­ativ­ity should be displayed.

PHOTO FORUM LINK: http://www.photography.ca/Forums/showthread.php?t=3049

Photography.ca winning member images from March 09

For the past few months we have added a new fea­ture on our pho­tog­ra­phy bul­letin board where the Admin on Photography.ca (Me, Marko),‚ chooses 1 photo that he thinks is great and talks about the photo. The Bicy­cle photo below titled Eqi­nox by thier­ry­lau­rent was my choice for this month. (check the pre­vi­ous link for the explanation).

We have lots of pho­tographs being sub­mit­ted each month on our forum for cri­tiques, assign­ments or just to show the photo. Choos­ing thierrylaurent’s photo as the ‹“win­nerž took‚ many hours of care­ful sift­ing. Given that it took so long to choose, I came across many many many close con­tenders. Seems like a waste of time just to include 1 photo so Ižd like to include 2 hon­ourable men­tions right here.

If you havenžt joined our forum I would encour­age you to do so. We are an extremely friendly bunch that share and learn daily.

Herežs the win­ning photo:

equinox
Equinox by thierrylaurent


Here are the 2 hon­ourable mentions


Dead flow­ers sele­nium toned by raiven


Recov­ery by Michaelaw

A Mad Moment — Life in Your Hands — Mad Aussie

As pho­tog­ra­phers we often find our­selves in all man­ner of sit­u­a­tions, and some­times, our moral­ity can be tested. Do we take the pic­ture of the lit­tle girl because we think she is a lit­tle cutie? Should we take a photo of that auto acci­dent? Take the photo, or let the lit­tle crea­ture die? These are just a few examples.


Just what bound­aries lie out there for us? Where and how do we find those bound­aries and lim­its within our­selves? What sub­jects and ele­ments are off lim­its to you per­son­ally when you have your cam­era in your hot, lit­tle hands?

Recently in our forums I posed a cou­ple of ques­tions to explore this line of thought. You can see those threads by click­ing the links below. I think you might find the dis­cus­sions inter­est­ing AND, I hope, you’ll even con­sider join­ing the forum your­self and telling us your thoughts as well.

Forum Threads

Life in Your Hands

Off Lim­its

By Mad Aussie — Photography.ca blog con­trib­u­tor & forum mem­ber
www.astrovisual.com.au
www.astrovisualphotography.com.au
www.istockimages.com.au

DPI & PPI

A les­son in Pho­tog­ra­phy often over­looks the famous acronyms of DPI and PPI. Two things that often con­fuse the heck out of peo­ple. Why is it that some images show on your com­puter at 72 DPI when you set your cam­era to the high­est res­o­lu­tion? And How does DPI dif­fer from PPI, I mean, can one let­ter in the acronym really make all that dif­fer­ent? YES. Let’s gan­der at the answer to these ques­tions, shall we?


Let’s start with PPI. Pix­els per Inch. This will affect the print size of your photo and will in turn affect the qual­ity of the out­put. If there are too few pix­els per inch, then the pix­els will be very large and you will get a very pix­i­lated image, thus affect­ing the qual­ity of the out­put. There are 2 ways that you can change the print size, by resam­pling or by not resam­pling. Not resam­pling is what you gen­er­ally want to do; this will only change the size of the print out. Using resam­pling will actu­ally change the num­ber of pix­els (and thus the file size) in order to match the print size.

DPI on the other hand refers only to the printer — Dots per Inch. Every pixel out­put is made up of dif­fer­ent col­ors of ink (gen­er­ally 4 or 6 col­ors — depend­ing on your printer). Due to the small amount of col­ors avail­able, the printer needs to be able to mix these inks to make up all the col­ors of the image. So each pixel of the image is cre­ated by a series of tiny dots. A high DPI printer has more dots mak­ing up each pixel, and thus a higher and bet­ter qual­ity image out­put. Vice versa for a lower qual­ity DPI printer.

Peo­ple often use the terms of DPI and PPI as one com­mon one, which is really not the case. They are both dif­fer­ent, and thus should be used as so.

PHOTOGRAPHY FORUM LINK: http://www.photography.ca/Forums/showthread.php?p=11200

Is it still art?

This photo, and oth­ers of sim­i­lar nature are con­sid­ered ‘art’ by some, but far from it by oth­ers. So is it Art? Or can you argue that this, along with an ad for tooth­paste, is just a form of pub­lic­ity and not artistic?

Well,‚ Art has dif­fer­ent mean­ings for dif­fer­ent peo­ple and there is no one answer for this issue. Think about it… have you ever been to a museum and seen a can­vas com­pletely painted in indigo blue? This is top of the line art accord­ing to avid artists. To oth­ers, this is sim­ply a waste of paint and can­vas. Or how about those early black & white nudes, oth­er­wise known as “early porn”. Time man­aged to some­how evolve these pho­tos into art. Or let us reflect on thou­sands of years back, when the cave­men wrote on the cave walls to com­mu­ni­cate and tell a story. Today, these draw­ings are etched in all art his­to­ri­ansž minds as the works of masters.

So truly, art and beauty is in the eye of the beholder and accord­ing to Edward Degas: “Art is not what you see, but what you make oth­ers see”.

Obvi­ously the ‘artist’ of this photo wanted us to see some­thing… A LOT of something.

FORUM LINK: http://www.photography.ca/Forums/showthread.php?t=570

How to Vignette

How to make a per­fect Vignette‚¦ add 1 cup oil to ‚½ cup vine­gar, dash with‚¦ now wait a minute. Not Vinai­grette. VIGNETTE. It’s the amaz­ing effect of hav­ing the cen­tral por­tion of the image show­ing while the rest of the image is dark­ened. Pho­tog­ra­phers can apply this effect to their pho­tos to add more empha­sis to their subject.


Pho­to­shop pro­vides numer­ous meth­ods to mas­ter the vignette. Want some insight? You can use an ellip­ti­cal mar­quee tool, inverse the selec­tion, and blur the four cor­ners. You can also brighten or darken the four cor­ners by work­ing with the level bal­ance on the inversed selec­tion. Lens cor­rec­tion (Fil­ter ‚” Dis­tort) also works well for adding a vignette. These are only two meth­ods, but there are cer­tainly more.

But what about those who pre­fer work­ing in a dark­room to achieve their artis­tic photo effects? In the dark­room, this is done by hold­ing an opaque mate­r­ial with a cir­cle or oval cut-out dur­ing the exposure.

Either way, a vignette can add drama or even soften a pho­to­graph all at once. The pos­si­bil­i­ties are endless.

FORUM LINK: http://www.photography.ca/Forums/showthread.php?p=17647

64 — Finding good photography subjects

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #64 talks about how to find good pho­tog­ra­phy sub­jects and was a sug­ges­tion by our pho­tog­ra­phy forum mem­ber F8&Bthere. Some­times we go through peri­ods where it’s dif­fi­cult to get out there and take pho­tos. Often this hap­pens in win­ter time when it’s too cold. Some­times though it hap­pens just because we are blocked. This pod­cast offers up quite a few tips and ideas on find­ing inter­est­ing pho­to­graphic sub­jects for indoor and out­door shoot­ing.‚ Use it as a lax­a­tive to help unblock you. :)


Links men­tioned in this pod­cast:
F8&Bthere’s orig­i­nal sug­ges­tion thread
Addi­tional ideas from 365 pho­tos in 2009 (thanks raiven)

If you are still lurk­ing on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly :) Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

Thanks as always to Benny, justaleecher and realestate­curve who posted a blog com­ment about our last pod­cast and to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. I Sub­scribe with iTunes I Sub­scribe via RSS feed I Sub­scribe with Google Reader I Sub­scribe for free to the Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast — Photography.ca and get all the posts/podcasts by Email
You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.