Five Points for Attention in Portrait Photography

Lead: Portrait has always been a hot topic in photography, and it is also very challenging. It takes a long time to practice to improve the shooting technique, so as to master the essence of portrait photography and shoot works with aura. Here are five points for attention in portrait photography. If we can overcome them one by one, we can not only shoot better works, but also greatly improve our photography skills.

Situation 1: The subject's eyes are out of focus.

As the saying goes:? Eyes are the windows to the human soul? . Eyes are undoubtedly a person's soul. If you want to shoot a portrait with a soul, you must first ensure that you can? The window of the soul? Very sharp and clear. When shooting portraits, it is recommended to focus on the human eye. However, at present, most autofocus systems of SLR cameras have certain accuracy. Beginners who use entry-level cameras can choose central focus and shoot by focusing first and then composing. If there is any dislocation, you can try to solve it by manual focusing. In addition, when focusing manually, if the camera supports the live view function, it can be used together to increase the success rate of manual focusing.

Eyes are the focus of portrait creation, which is very important to both the subject and the photographer. Photography: a lie through the lens.

Situation 2: Red eye phenomenon

I believe everyone is familiar with red eye, which often happens when taking pictures with the built-in flash of the camera. The principle is that the pupil will be enlarged in low light environment to increase the amount of light entering, and strong light will enter the pupil by using a flash lamp, which will be directed at the microvascular tissue behind the retina and then reflected back to the lens, thus producing red eye.

Nowadays, many cameras have red-eye prevention function, so you can flash the light in advance when shooting, which can narrow the pupil of the subject in advance and slow down the red-eye phenomenon. If it is necessary to use the built-in flash, you can also let the subject look at the light source for two seconds before shooting, so that the pupil can be contracted before shooting. If the external flash can adjust the angle, you can also jump the light to fill the light. In addition, the possibility of red eye can also be reduced by using off-camera flash to keep it at a certain distance from the camera lens.

Red-eye phenomenon can also be corrected later. Photography: bradleypjohnson.

Situation 3: Wide-angle portrait deformation

Although it is often said that the best focal length of portrait shooting is about 75- 105mm, different effects can be obtained by using wide-angle lens to create. As far as the APS frame commonly used by novice friends is concerned, the wide-angle focal length mostly falls within the range of 24-28mm, which is not only the starting focal length for learning landscape composition, but also the starting point for practicing wide-angle portrait shooting.

When shooting people with wide-angle lens, we should pay attention to the characteristics of portrait creation in each focal segment. For example, 24-28mm is suitable for the creation of characters and scenes. If we can grasp the angle and composition, we can fully present the perspective of the scene and make the picture more tense. If you don't grasp the characteristics of wide-angle shooting, you may shoot a horrible image because of the deformation of the wide-angle lens, which makes you in danger of being hunted down.

Of course, some people will use super wide-angle special effects such as fisheye lens to create, photography: Joostem

Situation 4: The subject is not clear.

When shooting portraits, we should pay attention to properly highlighting the main body of the characters, otherwise it will easily lead to confusion in the picture, and people will not know whether the focus of this picture is people, flowers behind them or cars next to them. To overcome this problem, we should not only start with composition, but also create a shallow depth of field to highlight the main body. When you think the subject is about to blend into the background, please let him get close to the camera. Out of context? Or use a large aperture to create a shallow depth of field effect to blur the background and make the subject clearer.

Appropriate shallow depth of field can emphasize the effect of the subject. Photography: Sebastian Anthony.

Scene 5: unnatural light and shadow

Proper light and shadow presentation and portrait creation can create different styles of atmosphere, but if it is not used well, it will also ruin the work. Generally speaking, for beginners, soft light is easier to shoot, such as scattered light on cloudy days, which will not leave too hard light and shadow on the subject's face, while the sunshine at noon on sunny days is too strong, which is easy to cause the contrast between light and shade on the subject's face. It can be used with the soft light board to slow down some overexposure and underexposure. If you use a flash to shoot indoors, you can also use it with a soft mask to soften the light.

Different lighting effects can render different image atmospheres. Photography: jDevaun