How to take a good portrait photo

If you want to take a good-looking portrait, you don't necessarily need professional lighting equipment and expensive cameras and lenses. Although the three elements of portrait play a decisive role, it is not a skill to shoot a good-looking portrait with the three elements of perfect portrait. It is a skill to shoot the effect that everyone is satisfied with.

Just like taking photos of other content, it is very important to control the equipment, be familiar with the scene and know what settings should be used when shooting. In order to take good portrait photos, we have to consider some other factors to make our works look more professional.

1, time

When taking photos outdoors, you should pay attention to the time, especially when it is sunny and sunny. Although most of the time we take pictures at will, the light in different time periods is different. For example, the light at noon is very hard, which will form a downward shadow on our face. At this time, the contrast of the shadow will be relatively high, so it is difficult to ensure the details of the bright and dark parts at the same time, and it is easy to take overexposed photos.

If we have to take photos outdoors in the midday sun, we'd better find some places that can provide shadows, such as the shade of a building or under a big tree, and try not to expose the model to the sun completely.

When shooting outdoor portraits, the best light is early morning or evening. At this time, the sun shines obliquely on the horizon, and the light shines evenly and softly on the body, making it easy to take good-looking photos.

Of course, the prime time is very short, maybe only a few minutes, so take good photos during this time, or it will be dark when the sun goes down accidentally. At night, you can only take portraits with city lights, and you can also take very beautiful portraits with colorful neon lights.

2. Perfect background

Background is an indispensable part of any photographic work. Although talent is the absolute subject, no matter how beautiful and lovely people are, they also need background. Of course, if the background is too eye-catching, it will interfere with the main body and weaken the overall aesthetic feeling.

Although the background is not as outstanding as other details, a good background determines the photographer's skill. A good photographer will consciously discover the excellent background and then create on this basis.

The main purpose of composition is to support the theme and influence the way of telling the content in the picture by guiding the way of reading pictures. If the background is too distracting and really attracts too much unnecessary attention and affects the expression of the theme, then it should definitely not be the background we want.

Usually, we want the background to be as simple and clean as possible, but sometimes we need a specific background to help the subject tell the story. If we shoot outdoors, we can't actively change the background content, so we should use our brains to think of some ways to avoid irrelevant elements in the background from interfering with the picture, such as changing the shooting angle, using perspective to let some elements in the picture block what we want to avoid appearing in the picture and so on. Try more and there will always be some angles suitable for the current shooting.

3, the right lens

Although we don't have to use expensive high-end lenses to shoot portraits, a suitable portrait lens will still add a lot of points to our photos.

According to the different shooting contents, we can choose lenses with different focal lengths.

If you want to replace more environments, you can choose a 35mm lens. The biggest feature of 35mm is that it is not easy to form excessive blurring of the background, because a key point in making shallow depth of field is to need a telephoto end, while the wide-angle focal length of 35mm and below will replace more background because of the short focal length, making the foreground as clear as the background. Therefore, the best choice for this focus segment is the portrait of the shooting environment.

The main purpose of substituting the environment is to highlight the role of the subject through the environment, and it is necessary to have a certain judgment on the background environment, otherwise it will be counterproductive and make the background usurp the role of the master, especially in the case of messy background, which may be counterproductive to highlight the subject.

Due to the characteristics of the wide-angle end, we can easily take a full-body photo with a focal length of 35mm not far from the main body. Even if you take a group photo, you don't need to choose a very open place, so you can easily capture everyone in the picture. At the same time, the background will not be lost because of the space compression caused by telephoto.

If you want to create a portrait by blurring the background, it is best to choose a lens with a longer focal length, such as a lens with a focal length of 85mm or even longer, which is also produced by every family.

With an 85mm lens, you can take portraits, even close-up portraits. However, if you want to take a full-length photo, you must shoot it at a relatively far place from the subject due to the limitation of focal length. Therefore, an important indicator of taking a portrait with medium and long focal length is that you need to shoot in an open space. It is very difficult to take a full-length photo in an indoor environment with a small extendable workspace.

And 50mm is a standard wild lens, which can open a large aperture to shoot a bust and narrow the aperture to shoot an environmental portrait. Because of this, in the film era, the standard lenses of most cameras are around 50mm focal length, and because the design of this 50mm fixed focus is relatively simple, after so many years of evolution and development, it has basically become one of the most cost-effective fixed focus lenses, and every family has a cheap lens with this focal length. For example, the standard lens of f/ 1.8 has a high cost performance, and there are also 50mm lenses with f/ 1.4, f/ 1.2 or even larger apertures. As for which lens to choose, it mainly depends on your budget.