Photography Tips - Portrait Photos

Portrait photography is an important aspect of photography in general. High quality portrait photos are impressive projections of emotions and feelings, and captures the objects' character forever. This article will provide you with guidelines for achieving such high quality portrait photos.

Although producing true high quality portrait photos is an art and requires experimentation and experience, there are some simple general techniques that you can follow in order to quickly improve your portrait photos. Here are a few:

Background: A good portrait photo, or for that matter any photo in which a person is the center of attention, should have a passive background that does not take the attention away from the object. Specifically a portrait photo is all about the objects face. Take your photos in a neutral background. A background that is comprised of soft solid colors is an example of a good background to use. A busy street or people moving around are examples of bad backgrounds to use in portrait photos.

Blurring: Another way to focus the viewer's attention on the object and not the background is to blur the background details. Blurring the background will literally lift the object out of the photo and make it stand out. The technique to blue the background is pretty simple you will need to set your camera to a shallow depth of field. You can do that by using a zoom lens and shooting from a short distance or with a wide aperture manual setting.

Lighting: Lighting is a simple but important issue in portrait photography. Natural lighting is preferable whenever possible. Natural light is much better at capturing the full color range and warmth of the skin than artificial lighting. Try taking portrait photos outdoors during the day. Position the subject in such a way that sunlight hits them from an angle and not directly. Taking photos with the sun behind the subject will result in a silhouette. On the other hand, taking photos with the sun right in front of the subject will result in overexposure and color distortion. You can use a fill-in flash to compensate for some shadowing that might occur on the face, especially in the nose area.

The eyes: Although a face has many details - nose, eyes, mouth, and so on - the eyes are the overwhelmingly important feature to focus on in a portrait photo. The eyes tell a story and they convey emotions, feelings and state of mind. Focusing on them will make the photo better project all those feelings. Depending on the emotions and story that you are trying to convey through the photo, guide your object to look straight to the camera or to look sideways by focusing on another object.

Experiment: It takes time and experience to perfect your portrait shooting abilities. With digital cameras the cost of taking photos is literally zero, thereby allowing you to experiment extensively until you get a good sense of how to produce high quality portrait photos.