How to take a good portrait

Lead: Portrait photography is the most difficult subject to grasp. Unlike still life, man is a movable individual; Unlike other creatures, people are intelligent creatures who can communicate at any time. It is precisely because of the particularity of people that photography is full of uncertainty.

But to sum up, portrait photography is nothing more than two points: snapping and posing. But when we take a snapshot, we can change it into a posture by communicating with the subject, and when we pose, we often need to capture the action or expression of the subject. Therefore, snapping and posing are not absolute, and this distinction is only for the starting point rather than the shooting process.

But when taking a snapshot, we must consider whether the subject is willing or not. If it is secretly captured, you don't have to consider it, but if it is aboveboard, you should consider how to communicate with the subject after discovery. An excellent portrait photographer needs not only profound technical skills (pre-lighting, photography and post-processing of photos), keen observation and outstanding aesthetics, but also communication skills. If you get beaten up for taking snapshots, you are still not a good portrait photographer, even if you are technically good.

We should also know that all this, including the so-called creativity, keen observation and outstanding aesthetics, is based on profound technical skills (pre-lighting, photography and post-photo processing). If you finally find the best posture of the subject and arouse her (his) mood, but you don't shoot it well because of poor technology, it will be a blow to everyone. You should know that a person's posture and demeanor at a certain moment may never be copied. If it fails, it means that everything can only be started again.

It can be seen that portrait photography needs a solid technical foundation and cannot be done overnight. But we can start with some basic knowledge of portrait photography.

In portrait photography, we often need to blur the background with a small depth of field to highlight the subject, even in indoor shed shooting. At the same time, we also need the dynamic range of the camera to be large enough to show the light and dark details well and make people take pictures more stereoscopic. Obviously, the DC with large depth of field and small dynamic range caused by small photosensitive elements can not meet the demand, which requires us to choose a camera above the level of a single digital camera.

Canon mid-range digital SLR 60D

Sony A55/A33 is the only single-shot digital camera that is perfectly compatible with SLR lenses. If possible, the bigger the camera, the better. But for beginners, the best choice is digital SLR in APS-C format or DX format. In terms of price, anyone can afford digital SLR in APS-C format and DX format. Another important reason is that the lens resources of digital SLR are huge, which is not as scarce as that of single-camera (except Sony A55/A33 single-camera).

Portrait lens usually refers to a large aperture fixed focus lens. Because the distortion of fixed-focus lens (barrel distortion and pillow distortion) is smaller than that of zoom lens, the aperture of fixed-focus lens is larger, and it is easier to create a small depth of field effect.

For beginners, the best choice is 50mm fixed focus. The 50mm fixed-focus lens has the same visual field as the human eye and is the most suitable lens for humanistic photography. Photography, too From 50mm to 50mm? On the one hand, it can be seen that the 50mm fixed focus head is irreplaceable.

50 mm fixed focus head

After you can skillfully use the 50mm fixed focus head, you can choose the 85mm fixed focus head. 85mm is the golden focal length of portrait photography, which can easily create a beautiful background blur effect even in a far place, especially suitable for outdoor full-length portraits.

85mm fixed-focus lens If you like to take close-ups of portraits, you can choose another commonly used portrait lens, 135mm fixed-focus lens. However, this lens is much more expensive than the 50mm and 85mm lenses of the same grade, and its practicality is limited. It is recommended to consider buying this lens after having a certain technical foundation and sufficient funds.

135mm fixed focus head

Although focusing is the best choice for portrait photography, it is not the only choice. It is popular to take portraits with wide-angle lenses, and even many portrait photographers like to use fisheye lenses. The advantage of taking portraits with wide-angle lenses and fisheye lenses is that the whole background can be easily incorporated into the picture, but it requires a good ability to control the scene, so that the scene can set off the atmosphere and set off the main body, rather than usurping the role of the master. Therefore, for beginners, it is best to try wide-angle and fisheye lenses on the basis of mastering the use of fixed-focus lenses to shoot portraits.

Note: If you choose APS-C or DX SLR, you need to consider the lens conversion coefficient. The lens conversion coefficient of Canon is 1.6, and that of Nikon, Sony and Pentax is 1.5. That is to say, if you choose an APS-C or DX format' SLR, you need to choose 50 divided by 1.6 or 1.5 to achieve focal lengths of 50mm, 85mm and135 mm.. 35mm, 85 divided by 1.6 or 1.5? 50mm, 135 divided by 1.6 or 1.5? 85mm lens.

Eyes are the windows of human soul and the soul of portrait photography.

An excellent portrait, through the eyes, we can understand what the photographer wants to express. However, if you want to shoot your eyes, you must have a vision. So how do you create a vision?

The easiest way is to let the subject's eyes face the direction of light, and naturally there will be eyes on them. If it is backlight shooting, the model's face is filled with light through the reflector to create eye light. Of course, this is only when posing. If it is a snapshot, the photographer needs more keen observation ability and solid photography technology to capture the fleeting vision.

Like all other photography topics, the most important part of portrait photography is the use of light. But the application of light and shadow is a very advanced technology, especially for portrait photography, but we can learn from some simple light and shadow applications based on portrait photography.

As mentioned above, the eyes are the soul of portrait photography, so the most basic lighting skill of portrait photography is to fill the face with light, so that the eyes of the subject can be photographed and the face can be clear. Pay attention to the softness of light to fill the face, otherwise too strong light will cause a heavy shadow (human skin is not a mirror, and light will diffuse when it shines on the skin. If the light is too strong, it will aggravate the shadow on the skin and stand out, which is what we often say. This is the taboo of portrait photography. There are two main ways to fill the face with light, one is to use natural light, and the other is to choose artificial light source.

Using natural light to shoot portraits

Choose natural light to shoot portraits, and the best time period is from sunrise to 9 am and from 4 pm to sunset. The light in these two periods is the softest and more suitable for portrait photography. But don't forget to bring a reflector, so that you can fill in the light when you have shadows on your face or shoot against the light. If you must shoot outdoor portraits outside these two time periods, you can choose to shoot in the shade and fill the face with a reflector, but you must not shoot portraits in direct sunlight, because too strong light will cause the shadow of the model's face to be too heavy, even if you use a reflector to fill the light, it will not help.

Wonderful work of artificial light source

There are many choices of artificial light sources, the most common one is the built-in flash of the camera, but the light of the built-in flash is too hard and the power is low, and the range of supplementary light is limited. Although a soft mask can be added to the built-in flash to scatter light, it is not a good method for low-power built-in flash. A better choice is to use external flash+soft mask, which can better fill the face.

The advantage of using external flash is that it is very mobile and can be used indoors and outdoors. But for professional indoor portrait photography, the best choice is to shoot in the shed (an artificial studio with photographic lighting is arranged indoors), but this is a considerable test for the photographer's lighting technology and funds, which is not something that ordinary photographers can play.

Because the depth of field of portrait lens (especially large aperture fixed focus lens) is very small, the photographer's ability to control the depth of field will be higher. Many novices use a large aperture fixed-focus lens to shoot portraits, because the aperture is too large (the aperture size is inversely proportional to the depth of field), the depth of field is too small, which leads to blurring. In fact, don't blindly pursue small depth of field when taking portraits. In many cases, we need to narrow the aperture to increase the depth of field.

Depth of field control failure: excessive aperture leads to excessive blurring of distant eyes.

Successful depth of field control: the subject to be represented is very clear.

What is depth of field? In short, after the lens is focused, it can form a clear image in the range before and after focusing, which is called depth of field. The smaller the depth of field, the smaller the distance range; The greater the depth of field, the greater the distance range. Therefore, the minimum depth of field of the lens in portrait photography is often suitable for frontal photography. If the depth of field of profile photography is still very small, the first half of the face is clear, the second half is blurred, and even only the eyes are clear, and other places are blurred. Obviously, most of the time this effect is a failure.

It can be seen that in portrait photography, we need to decide the aperture setting according to the actual situation, rather than blindly pursuing the effect of large aperture and small depth of field.