What are the skills of outdoor portrait shooting?

Now more and more people tend to go out of the indoor studio and shoot outdoors. The following are the techniques for outdoor portrait shooting. Let's learn together:

1. Choose your own focus

When you choose the autofocus option of the camera and let the camera help you choose the focus, your shooting is on a road of lack of opinion. The autofocus function of a camera is usually designed to focus automatically on the object closest to the lens. Like my 1DS Mark III, it will automatically select the group as the focus, and then calculate an average distance among all the selected focuses as the "best focus", which is completely child's play. So choose the right focus when taking pictures, because you are the ultimate decider of your photos.

2. always focus on your eyes

The eyes are the windows of the soul, and you will find that the eyes are an element that can not be ignored in any good portrait photo. Of course, the decisive factor that constitutes an excellent portrait is not only the eyes, but also the strong feelings conveyed by the eyes. So when you are shooting, you should make the subject's eyes the clearest point in the photo. And when you focus the model's eyes with a large aperture, the lens will blur the background and make people's skin look softer and smoother.

3. Use a large aperture to obtain a shallow depth of field.

There are many reasons to buy a large aperture lens. The most important reason is that it can help us get a shallow depth of field when shooting. You can use the large aperture lens of F2.8 or F4 to get the soft natural light needed for portrait shooting, and you can naturally blur the background.

4. Try not to shoot portraits with a focal length less than 50mm, and use a focal length of 70mm or longer.

You may always hear the subject say, "Why does my face look so big?" You know, any focal length below 70mm will cause the distortion of the subject more or less, although it will not be obvious before 50 mm, so it is best not to shoot portraits with a focal length less than 50 mm. The compression effect of telephoto lens can increase the blur of the background, so most of my portraits are shot with a focal length of 120mm to 200 mm.

Shoot in RAW format

I've said this sentence more than a thousand times, and I'm sure I'll say it again ten thousand times. RAW format is an unmodified data compilation recorded by camera sensor during exposure, which is the original digital source of photos. When you shoot in JPEG format, it looks no different from that in RAW format, but when you edit the image, you will find that the image shot in JPEG format is missing a lot of data, and the image in RAW format allows us to edit the photo to a greater extent. You can recall that when the white balance of the camera is set incorrectly, you must spend a lot of energy and time trying to adjust it later to eliminate the color cast. At this time, if you shot in RAW format before, you can easily save the photo because it allows you to restore the original color of the image.

6. Take a gray card with you to adjust the white balance.

When you open Adobe Camera Raw or other Raw image editing software, there is always an option for you to choose a custom white balance in the application. It is usually a dropper-style icon. You can adjust the white balance of the image by clicking the neutral gray that you think is correct.

Imagine that you took nearly 800 photos in four scenes at a time, but those photos were all taken with the automatic white balance set by the camera for you. 800 photos have 800 different white balance values, which is a nightmare in the later period. If you can set the white balance of a gray card in each scene according to your shooting theme during the first shooting, you will save a lot of later time. As long as you open your most satisfactory photo in the later software, and then use the dropper to select the white balance, you can adjust the white balance of the remaining photos synchronously, thus saving a lot of precious time. If you plan to make better use of your time, the smartest thing to do is to set the white balance every 30 minutes or with the change of light. )

7. Avoid direct sunlight

Direct light is dazzling, which can easily cause your subject to squint and produce a thick shadow on his face. If you don't shoot in direct light, you can avoid shadows. I have always believed that only soft light can describe people's natural appearance, and proper exposure and correct white balance can make your photos more eye-catching.

8. Be more careful when shooting on cloudy days.

Clouds are nature's soft boxes. Clouds with the right thickness can enrich the color of your photos and reflect unexpected light.

9. Use reflected light

Learn to control the direction of light and try to simulate the lighting effect of photography studio by using reflected light. It is not a good idea to point the subject directly at the sun unless you want to get a clean outline. An effective way is to wait for the clouds to move to cover the sun, which can often produce a very obvious contrast effect between light and shade.

10. Use existing reflected light.

For example, you can use a nearby white car as a ready-made reflector when shooting, as long as it is not painted with a layer of gray. You can change the tone of the photo white balance. )