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Tutorial Essential Things to Think About for Portrait Photography

Professora Akira

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Lighting pattern
The lighting pattern refers to how the light falls on your subject’s face. Note that your lighting pattern will determine the mood of the final portrait and whether or not the subject is flattered. Therefore, it’s a critical piece of the portrait photography puzzle, one you must get right for impactful results.

There are four main types of lighting patterns:
📌Split lighting
📌Loop lighting
📌Rembrandt lighting
📌Butterfly lighting

And there are two lighting pattern styles:
📌Short lighting
📌Broad lighting

Lighting ratio
A ratio is a comparison of one thing to another; here, the ratio compares the dark and light sides of your subject’s face. How much difference is there from the shadow to the highlight side?Higher lighting ratios lead to greater contrast and increased moodiness. On the other hand, lower ratios lead to less contrast and will give your portraits a lighter, fresher feeling.

Quality of light
Another aspect of lighting you need to think about when shooting? Whether you want your light to be hard or soft.
✳️Hard light is produced by a small source and is characterized by high contrast, enhanced subject texture, added drama, and harsh, well-defined shadow edges. Examples of hard light sources are:

📌The sun (yes, it’s large, but it’s far enough way to be relatively small)
📌A bare light bulb
📌The small built-in flash on your camera
📌An unmodified speedlight
✳️Soft light is produced by a very large light source. It is low contrast (i.e., flat), less texture-enhancing, and is more forgiving and flattering for people photography. Examples of soft light sources are:

📌The sky on an overcast day
📌Large studio softboxes
📌A large reflector
📌An on-camera flash that has been bounced off a ceiling or wall

Lens selection
Your lens will change the appearance of both the subject and the background.A wide-angle lens will introduce distortion and cause the subject’s face to look abnormal and stretched. It will also give you a large, sweeping view of the background.

Background
One thing many photographers fail to think about is the background. It’s so easy to be focused on all the other stuff that you forget to even look at the background, which then ruins an otherwise great image.

Two questions you should ask yourself:
Does the background make sense with the portrait?
Does the background distract the viewer from the subject?
There are four background elements that can distract the viewer:

📌Contrast
📌Bright colors (warm tones are the worst, like red and yellow)
📌Sharpness
📌Bright areas
Watch for these in your viewfinder and adjust your camera position and composition accordingly. After all, the eye is attracted to the brightest and sharpest area of an image – so if you can keep the background dark, blurry, and low contrast, your subject will take center stage.Get your portrait subject away from the background (far enough to get trees and grass out of focus), and watch for hot spots that grab the eye. Sometimes, simply moving your camera a foot or two to the left or right can eliminate trouble areas and give you a cleaner background that lets the subject shine:

Exposure and metering
For a portrait of a still subject, I almost always use the following camera settings:

📌Manual mode
📌Single-shot drive mode (that is, I press the button to take a single image)
📌Single Point AF
📌One-Shot AF (i.e., AF-S focus mode) to focus and lock
📌Shade white balance (I am usually working in the shade, but if you’re in the bright sun, you might choose Direct Sunlight instead. Just pick one that matches your lighting condition and leave it.)
📌RAW format

These give me the most control over one important thing: capturing a consistent exposure from one frame to the next.

Focusing
Back-button focus, which lets you engage your camera’s focusing mechanism by pressing a button on the back of your camera, rather than the shutter button.That way, you can lock focus on the subject – on their eye, if you’re close enough – then recompose the portrait and shoot away. Unless you or the subject move, there is no need to refocus.Of course, if you’re shooting a moving target, like kids in action, you’ll want to choose different focus settings. Try continuous focusing (AI Servo/AF-C) plus your camera’s fastest burst mode.









source:digital/mobilephotography
 
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