Deciphering indoor portrait shooting skills

Lead: How can we take a good portrait of the environment? As we all know, environmental portrait photography is not only a simple portrait photography, but also needs environmental contrast to show the relationship between people and their surroundings. Let's learn the shooting skills of indoor portraits with me.

The key to deciphering the effect of indoor portrait shooting is lighting; To learn to control light, we must first understand how to control the characteristics of light, such as hardness, light ratio, color temperature and so on.

You must have heard the saying:? For indoor portrait shooting, how to light it determines what kind of portrait you get. There is no doubt that mastering lighting skills is the most important part of taking good indoor portraits. Knowing how lighting changes and what effect it will have is the basis of learning lighting.

First, the appropriate background choice

The following three are more traditional statements, which can be regarded as more classic theories of environmental portrait background selection.

Quiet: Lu Xiaochuan's Works

First, choose a distinctive background, that is to say, distinctive, which can reflect the environment of your people or things. Combined with our popular portrait photography creation, for example, as your background, you should attract people, and this background should have characteristics, so as to distinguish it from others, and to explain your work or your subject and the environment in which your characters are located, and play a role in setting off.

Second, the background should be concise. Everyone may understand this, because we always say that photography is the art of subtraction and painting is the art of addition, that is to say, you should be able to extract your picture and your focus through this simplest element, so the background should generally be concise.

Fanna's works before and after

Third, the background should have a tone, which is the tone from the color picture and the contrast from the black and white picture. In other words, as a background, there is a tone or contrast with your subject, so that the subject can stand out.

Second, the full combination of scenes and characters.

The female model in the environmental portrait is not only coquettish, but also perfectly and beautifully combined with the environment, so the modeling of the model is very particular. According to the needs of the theme, photographers often dress up models as special roles with the help of the power of clothing modeling.

Yue: LV Xiaochuan's works

At the same time, sketches of various scenes need to be designed before shooting. If it is plot photography, you need to conceive the story of the photo, and complete the final role-playing environmental portrait creation through precise control of a series of complex tasks.

Third, details are the key elements to enhance the theme.

Ren Yan's Works of Men's Gang

In addition, in order to shoot a good environmental portrait, the position and size of the characters in the environmental picture, the photographer's action, color contrast and so on. They are all important factors of environmental portraits, and details affect the perfection of the whole, and they are also the key elements to create pictures.

Fourth, camera settings

What are the usual suggestions for indoor shooting? High sensitivity and large aperture? . At first, your camera should be set to ISO to keep the noise as high as possible within an acceptable range, and use the maximum aperture of the lens to get the fastest shutter speed. Of course, these settings are interrelated and all contribute to exposure. So you need to adjust them according to your shooting environment and the desired effect and make a compromise.

Fortunately, most modern digital SLR cameras provide good high-sensitivity performance, so most indoor light sources and low light are not a problem. But even if your camera produces a lot of noise at high sensitivity, it is not a serious problem. You can keep these noises, or you can use noise reduction technology to reduce them later. Many photographers actually artificially add noise to photos to simulate the effect of film. Simple advice: Don't worry about noise unless it affects your creative intention.

Another element of shooting beautiful portraits in low light is a large aperture lens. Large aperture means that the maximum aperture is at least f/2.8. The larger the aperture, the more light passes through the lens. This will give you more choices in ISO and improve the shutter speed. Large aperture lens can also create a shallow depth of field effect, which is very useful in portrait photography.

Shutter speed is an important consideration, not only because it will affect exposure, but also because low-speed shutter will lead to potential blur. However, you may find that occasionally some blurred photos are more artistic, and portrait photos don't have to be as sharp as needle tips.

Five, run out

1, natural light

Windows may be the most beautiful light source you can find. It is like a huge soft box, and different curtains can also produce various effects. Just put the model near the window and let the light have a dramatic effect.

"Warm" belly also has spring works.

Sunlight entering through a window is usually scattered light. Its characteristics are: large lighting area, soft and uniform, which can not only reproduce rich layers and textures, but also better express the three-dimensional sense, so it should be an ideal choice for shooting indoor portraits.

For centuries, painters like to use the sunlight coming in from the window to paint portraits, because this kind of light has strong modeling ability and good projection. Photographers often use this light to shoot portraits indoors in the future.

? Control the distance from the main body to the window.

When the subject is close to the window, because one side is directly exposed by outdoor light, the brightness is very high, while the shadow surface is very dark, resulting in a strong contrast between light and dark, which makes it difficult for us to take into account the details of the light and dark poles, which brings great difficulties to exposure. The shadow brightness of an indoor portrait cannot be the same as that of an outdoor portrait. It can only rely on the weak reflection of indoor walls, and these reflections are sometimes insufficient. The closer the figure is to the window, the greater the contrast between light and shade.

Yue: LV Xiaochuan's works

If the subject can stay away from the window and close to the wall without a light source, it is actually equivalent to weakening the main light and strengthening the auxiliary light. The contrast of characters will be reduced, and the tone will tend to be dull, but the levels will be rich and the details will be well represented.

? Subject positioning adjustment

When shooting portraits indoors, you can flexibly adjust the orientation of the subject according to different requirements.

If you want to show the characters completely and vividly and form ideal eye light, you can make the subject face the window and use forward lighting to achieve it. If you want to emphasize the three-dimensional sense, you can make the side of the subject face the window and use the side light to form a sharp contrast to highlight the three-dimensional sense. Of course, you can also make the subject turn his back to the window, and use the backlight to create a silhouette effect to express a simple sense of form.

Candlelight I am an old popsicle work.

? Understand the reflective ability of indoor reflective surfaces.

The natural light outside the window will affect the bright side of the subject. The reflective intensity of reflective surfaces such as indoor walls, floors and furniture furnishings directly affects the dark side of the subject, that is, the shadow part, and also determines the light ratio of the characters.

The closer the subject is to the wall facing the window, the lighter the color of the reflective surface such as the wall and the ground, the higher the reflectivity, the brighter the shadow surface of the person and the smaller the light ratio. When using natural light outside the window to shoot portraits indoors, a small room with light walls will reflect more light than a large and dark room, so the whole space environment will appear brighter.

2. Indoor light source

Dimfragrance works with surging fragrance.

Using indoor light bulbs can also produce good results. We can take off the lampshade of the electric lamp and use only the light bulb. At the beginning, only the main light source is placed in front of the model, illuminating half of it, higher than the head. This can produce classic lighting effects. The second lamp can be placed far behind the model as a backlight.

Sixth, post-processing.

In addition to creative post-processing, the following are some things to pay attention to:

White balance:

Not all light sources have the same color temperature. No matter what they look like to the naked eye, different light sources will project different colors of light. Therefore, if bright tungsten lamp is used as the main light of portrait photography and the window light source is used as the background light, unexpected color temperature mixing will be encountered. Fortunately, you can correct this deviation in post-processing. But if these remixes have nothing to worry about for you, then leave it alone. These colors are acceptable. If you can't accept them, you can also treat them as artistic colors or black and white photos. So don't worry.

Noise:

Many times, I personally like to have some noise in photos. But if the ISO used is too high, noise reduction is needed. We have a lot of useful camera built-in software, third-party software or plug-ins to deal with. For example, I will use Lightroom's noise reduction tool or Photoshop's noise ninja plug-in