Tips for portraits

[kbreit]

In a few weeks I am going to take my first stab at portrait photography. My friend Rick and his new wife Natalie will be my subjects. I have an XT with basically no custom hardware.

Can someone give me some tips? I'm particularly worried about the backdrop and lighting. Any advice is great.

[SkipD]

Keep the subjects away from the backdrop - whatever you use - by at least about six feet.

You will probably want some controllable, relatively soft, lighting. This, for the most part, eliminates using an on-camera flash. However, if you have a flash such as the EX-series Speedlites that can tilt and swivel, you can aim them at large reflective surfaces and let the light from the reflective surfaces illuminate the subject.

Using daylight - particularly if the sky is somewhat overcast - plus a few reflectors is one way to do the lighting with little or no monetary investment.

Reflectors can be made from all sorts of readily available materials.

White sheets can do a fair job, but you will need to find some sort of a frame to stretch them over and allow you to control the position and angles.

Some of the automotive windshield sunscreens can be used as reflectors.

"Foamcore", a thin styrofoam sheet lined on both sides with paper, is an inexpensive and handy material for reflectors. It's usually available at office supply stores, and is primarily sold as a poster board.

A live helper can be useful to hold reflectors at whatever position you might need.

If you want to get into buying some studio flash equipment, I would suggest you look at www.AlienBees.com. They have equipment that, while not the lowest priced in the market, is in my opinion the best for the money that you can find in the lower price range. I am extremely happy with their product, and a lot of other folks on this forum are as well. There are other choices, of course, but you either pay more or accept less in the features/specifications.

[kbreit]

What direction of lighting do you recommend?

My problem is that shooting outside is hard since it's winter and there's snow. I'm thinking of an indoor setup. Do you think that I could get away with some lamps bouncing their light off of a reflector?

[Titus213]

One solution is to light only the subject, letting the background go black. Shoot flash, manual. If you have no flash other than pop-up your solutions are limited. I just posted a portrait in the People section that was available light with some post processing. Use the AE lock function and meter just the faces. It takes some work for sure and definitely some post processing. You can run the ISO up and then use Neat Image to remove any unwanted noise.

If you use the kit lens you will probably get soft images below f7.0, I do.

[JohnnyG]

How do you soften the skin for the portraits? I've been told that my portraits are too sharp as far as the skin.

[kevin harding]

You can do it in post-processing with blur tools and the like, or you can play around with aperture, or a soft-focus technique.

I'd prefer to do it in post-processing as I would have absolute control over the sharpening and softening.

[SkipD]

Another way to soften the image is with a soft focus filter like this one: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=NavBar&A=getItemDetail&Q=&sku=94141&is=REG

The filter, of course, is a one-shot deal. Once the photo is taken with it, there's no going back. Kevin's suggestion of post-processing changes might be the best because you can play with the amount of softening and where you do it in the image.

[Robert_Lay]

In a few weeks I am going to take my first stab at portrait photography. My friend Rick and his new wife Natalie will be my subjects. I have an XT with basically no custom hardware.

Can someone give me some tips? I'm particularly worried about the backdrop and lighting. Any advice is great.

I will not quibble about your cold weather excuse - it's a problem.

You may want to ask yourself in which environment is it more difficult to learn portrait photography - in a one light environment, or in a two light environment. Outdoors, a beginner should leave the flash off and learn to make the best of the existing light.

Learning portraiture has, in my opinion, two facets - lighting and posing. They overlap to some extent. Of the two, lighting is perhaps the more important. More often than not, you want soft diffuse lighting - best obtained from open shade or "northern light".

The reason lighting is the most important consideration is because lighting it is the only way in which you can hope to transform the true, 3 - dimensional object into an image that looks equally 3 - dimensional. In other words, if you fail at lighting, you have failed in making your subject appear real.

The camera has a difficult time coping with the dynamic range of the light, and it is your job to minimize the distortion of the range of tones that the camera will capture.

Whatever you do, indoors or outdoors, put your initial efforts into the issue of lighting - first, make the best use of what you are presented with, and then in time, learn how to create the lighting you want artificially.

Learn to control shadows in the face - make sure they are just strong enough to give depth and form to the subject and learn how to soften them as necessary - before the shutter is pressed.