Magazine Tips

1. Play with eye contact

It’s amazing how much the direction of your subject’s eyes can impact an image.

Now, when you’re just starting out with portraits, I highly recommend you work on attaining perfect eye contact (with the eye in sharp focus). This looks great, and it can create a real sense of connection between a subject and those viewing the image.

Once you become a more advanced portrait shooter, however, there are a few more techniques worth trying.

2. Go with a Wide Angle

Shooting with a wide angle lens attached to your camera can help create some memorable shots when you’re doing portrait photography.

At very wide focal lengths you can create some wonderful distortion. It might not be the type of shot you take of your wife or girlfriend (unless she’s in a playful mood) but using these focal lengths will enlarge parts of the face or body that are on the edge of the frame more than what is in the centre.

3. Introduce Movement

Portraits can be so static – but what if you added some movement into them? This can be achieved in a few ways:

• by making your subject move

• by keeping your subject still but having an element in the scene around them move

• by moving your camera (or its lens to achieve a zoom burst)

The key with the above three methods is to use a slow enough shutter speed to capture the movement.

The alternative is to have your subject obviously move fast but to use a shutter speed so fast that it ‘freezes’ their movement.

Environmental Portrait