Advice on taking portrait shots with your digital camera
Most people buy their cameras to take family portraits. With digital technology, you can shoot images and print them out on photo paper right at home, if you own a photo quality printer. Lets look at some of the ways you can enhance your portrait quality.
Lighting
It’s important to understand the basics of lighting to make good portraits. Imagine a 2d drawing of the outline of a circle. Now imagine it shaded from light to dark. The circle now looks like a sphere! That’s what we try and do in photography as well – we try and represent a 3d object in two dimensions. Now, if you use an on camera straight-on flash, you are producing an image like the outline of the circle, that is, totally flat lighting which doesn’t do justice to the 3d model. What you need to do here is, keep the flash off center. Meaning, if you have a flash with a cable, keep it away from the camera angle, maybe away and a little higher, making pleasing portrait photos. If you don’t have a cable flash, try bouncing the flash off a wall or the ceiling. You could also try using a diffuser, which could be as simple as putting a piece of tracing paper in front of the flash. Remember to take the exposure reading from the bounced light, not the basic light.
While shooting indoors, you can get great portraiture effects by just shooting with the available window light, and no flash. Try and shoot in the early morning or evening, where the sun is not too high. You will get a beautiful warm toned light at this time, which is great for reproducing flesh tones on a photographic image.
Use the right lens
The lens – do NOT use a wide angle lens to shoot your favorite person’s portrait photograph! A wide angle distorts objects close to it, which means the person’s nose may look unusually large when you are going to shoot a close up portrait with a wide angle. The ‘minds eye’ ‘sees’ images somewhat similar to a 135mm lens (for a 35mm standard). Try zooming in for portraits, take a few steps backwards if you have to, but a longer focal length will not only give you minimum distortion, it will also help throw the background out of focus, which we many times prefer, in portraiture.
Using filters
You may try using a warm tone filter, which gives pleasing colors to flesh tones in a portrait. Alternatively, you could adjust this on Photoshop by increasing the red & yellow and/or decreasing blue on the color adjustment menu. You could try using a diffusing filter (on the lens). This filter gives a soft feel to the entire image, and also hides small scars and marks on the facial skin, making it look soft. This touch can be given on Photoshop as well, under the filter menu select distort, and under that diffusing filter.
Finally after you have shot the image, you could give it an unusual border, maybe a black border with a white outline? This gives a great touch to portrait photographs.