How to take a big picture?

In portrait photography, we can use a variety of techniques to shoot to present different visual effects. Taking headshots is very popular with photographers, friends and subjects, and headshots of male and female models or children often appear on the covers of various magazines. This composition method is relatively simple and the expression form is very direct. Let's learn the skills of this shooting technique.

First, the choice of camera and lens when taking big photos

When taking big photos, it is recommended that you use a professional SLR camera as shooting equipment, because SLR cameras have incomparable advantages over ordinary small digital card cameras. But that doesn't mean you have to use a very high-end digital SLR camera. Generally, entry-level SLR cameras are enough. By using certain shooting skills, we can take good headshots.

For the choice of lens, generally speaking, the imaging quality of fixed focus lens is much higher than that of zoom lens. The aperture of fixed-focus lens is larger than that of zoom lens, which can realize good background blur, thus highlighting our main body. If the economic price adjustment allows, you can choose some very professional "portrait lenses", such as 85mm F 1.4. If you don't have much budget, it's also good to choose a fixed-focus standard lens, such as 50 mm F 1.8.

(Beautiful headshots)

But sometimes, due to the special limitation of shooting range, the fixed-focus lens seems to be inadequate. For example, when shooting an exhibition, we sometimes have to keep a certain distance from the model, so we can't get close to the subject and get a better shooting distance and composition. At this time, choosing and using a zoom lens with a wide zoom range will bring great convenience to our shooting.

Shooting skills:

When we take big pictures of babies or children, we recommend that you use a zoom lens. Because it is impossible for children of this age to keep a certain posture to shoot photographers, in addition to guiding children's expressions and movements, we can also use zoom lenses to help us change the composition in time, providing us with more and better opportunities to capture children's moving moments.

Second, the camera settings when taking big photos

Taking a big photo is the same as taking other types of portraits. We need to set the camera correctly to complete the normal shooting. These even include aperture value, shutter speed, ISO sensitivity, metering mode, exposure compensation and photo storage format. When we take big photos, we suggest using spot metering to measure people. Digital SLR cameras generally have three metering modes, namely 3D color matrix metering mode, central focus metering mode and spot metering mode. Spot metering mode takes the area around the focus as the metering reference center, with a narrow range and a diameter of about 3 mm ..

(Application of exposure locking in headshots)

In photo shooting, because the human face is the main body of the whole picture, and the focus is near the focus, we suggest that you choose the spot metering mode to ensure that the information elements near the focus are exposed normally, while other elements, such as the edge of the human face and the background exposure, are not so important here.

Third, some skills of taking big photos

Here are some photo examples to further illustrate the four specific methods and skills of taking big photos.

Take big photos with different composition methods.

This is a photo with a traditional vertical composition. Vertical composition is one of the most commonly used composition methods in headshots. In this work, the characters' faces occupy almost four-fifths of the whole picture, which clearly and directly depicts the beautiful face of Sisi girl. In this way of composition, we should pay attention to the layout of people's faces in the whole picture and the places that must be omitted or even deleted because of the special shooting method of headshots. In this picture, the photographer decisively "cut off" his ears in order to focus the reader's attention on the beautiful face of the model. This cutting method needs to be "neat", either to include the whole ear in the whole composition or to cut it off altogether, instead of leaving half of the ear in our composition and the other half outside our picture, so the picture is very uncoordinated.