Portrait Photography

Portrait Photography - Definition

Portrait photography, or portraiture, is a type of photography aimed toward capturing the personality of a person or group of people by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses. A portrait photograph may be artistic or clinical. Frequently, portraits are commissioned for special occasions, such as weddings, school events, or commercial purposes. Portraits can serve many purposes, ranging from usage on a personal web site to display in the lobby of a business.

The subject of portraiture is extremely broad and can take an entire career in photography to truly begin to understand. Here we’ll be looking at a few things you can do to improve your portraiture. Rather than simple tips and tricks that might only work for one specific situation, we’ll look at things more broadly and discuss an approach to portrait photography.

Although we’ll be diving into a few genres of portrait photography to illustrate the points at hand, these ideas do not apply specifically to family photography, engagement photography, studio photography, or any other genre of portraiture. Each of these can be applied to every type of portrait you make. Before we jump into those, though, let’s quickly define what a portrait is for our purposes today.

What is a Portrait?

At its simplest, portraiture is the likeness of a person represented in a photograph. For the sake of brevity here, let’s define portraiture in a more narrow way so we can focus on the steps to making better photographs of people. Let’s assume that a portrait requires the subject to be a knowing collaborator in the process and not an incidental part of the resulting photograph. Let’s also assume that there’s a larger story to be told with our portraits so we can avoid being included in a mashup of identical posts on social media.

What are the Important Elements of Portraiture?

As with all photographs, the main photographic components of a portrait are light, composition, and moment. By focusing on each of these in our portrait photography, we’ll stand a better chance of making great images. In addition, since we’re working with people in portrait photography, the human element is also extremely important. All the technique in the world won’t fix an uninspired expression. For the rest of our time here, we’ll dig deeper into these four elements and how we can work on them.

Light

Let’s start with the basic building block of all photography: light. Light is just as important in a portrait as it is in any other type of photography, if not more important. Light can be used to create mood or further the story you’re trying to tell. Consider a close-up of a person short-lit, staring off into the distance and surrounded by darkness. Light plays the role here of creating mystery. Now consider the late afternoon sun illuminating a smiling couple as they walk along a beach. Light, in this case, helps to create a positive and bright feeling to the image.

"In photography, there is no such thing as

good light or bad light.

There is only appropriate light."

When thinking about light, we need think about its quality. This can be especially difficult in the beginning, but there are a few questions we can ask ourselves to help out. Where is it coming from? What colour is it? How does that affect my image? If we’re wanting to create warm, glowing family portraits, midday is not the time to do that in most parts of the world. Planning portrait sessions around the light you need for the emotions you’re trying to bring out, or breaking out the strobes and creating your own light, is a great way to ensure you’ll get the results you’re after.

Composition

Composition is a large part of how we, as photographers, give our viewers information. Consider again the couple on the beach from the beginning of our discussion about light. A wide composition including white sand, palm trees, and parasols gives us a sense of place and makes the photograph more about a couple in a situation. However, if we then switch to our trusty 70-200mm (equivalent) and get a close-up of the couple with a blurry background, the photograph becomes more about the couple than it does the situation they’re in.

In order to begin composing a portrait, we need to think about our intention (what we want the image to say to our viewers) and the output (how the image will be shown to our viewers). Our intention defines what we do or do not include in the composition. As we discussed with the simple example above, this can greatly affect the amount of information that the viewer receives. Output also informs how we compose. A portrait on Instagram, for example, needs to be much closer and simpler than a double-page spread in a magazine. It will be viewed smaller and by someone who is likely passing time rather than setting out to spend time with photographs.

As with any composition, we begin by considering what needs to be in the image and what does not. This will not only help us to tell the story we’re looking to tell, but help us to reduce the clutter of the real world and simplify our composition down to something powerful.

Example: Environmental Portrait Photography

A style of portraiture in which composition is extremely important is environmental portraiture. This type of image is used to give the viewer a window into someone’s world by showing a person in the place they spend much of their time doing something they often do. It is about the place or action just as much as it is about the person. Both elements of this style of portraiture contribute to an overall story. Thus, choosing what to keep in your frame and what to remove with an environmental portrait should be considered first and foremost when framing your image.

Quite often, environmental portraits are made with shorter focal lengths, so don’t be afraid to get out that 24mm or 35mm lens. A wide angle lens will allow us to get close to the subject. This has a couple of benefits. The first is that it allows the subject to remain large in the composition while still including a lot of background and foreground to further the story. Wide-angle lenses also tend to feel quite inclusive. The photographer’s necessary proximity to the subject transfers quite well into the final image and the viewer will likely feel that they are right there with the subject. Many environmental portraits also make use of smaller apertures to have more legible detail in the foreground and background, as well.

Moment

The third element of portraiture is arguably the most important one. The slice of time we choose to show tells our viewer a lot about us and a lot about the subject. The peak of a smile, an introspective look into the distance, fingers fidgeting in the lap. All of these moments tell us something about our time with the subject. People are complex and made up of millions of moments. The one we choose to photograph and show is the only story we’ll give to our viewer. 

Example: 

Family Portrait Photography

Let’s consider a type of photography that is all about moments – family photography. The definition of a family portrait has changed dramatically over the years. Traditionally, it may have been focused heavily on getting every member of the family in the frame looking at the camera together (this was the moment – us, now). Their heads would be placed in patterns of imaginary triangles to give a pleasing pattern for the viewer to follow as they explore the image. It would likely be photographed in extremely soft studio light or open shade to ensure everyone was flattered and that the world “smile” would likely have been uttered just prior to releasing the shutter. While this sort of image certainly has a place, a more modern take would be the lifestyle family portrait.

Lifestyle Portrait Photography

A lifestyle family portrait focuses less on the moment of the family simply being together and more on the moments they experience while they are together. It is the photographer’s job to influence the moments that will be presented and then be ready to capture them in the best light. This is potentially far more difficult than a simple portrait of everyone looking into the camera, but also potentially far more meaningful for the family themselves. What parent doesn’t want to hear their child screaming with joy and have that moment immortalised to look back on for years to come?

The Human Element

We talked above about the technical elements of portrait photography. Composition, light, and moments will bring the photograph together, but the subject needs to be part of it as well. Their ‘performance’ can make or break our photograph. If we don’t think of what we’re doing as photography, but simply as human interaction, the human element becomes much easier to incorporate into our photography.

It is this one very simple thing we can do to improve our portraits and make them stand out from the masses of images that flood our eyes every day. We can be curious. Be curious about our subjects. About what they do. About why they do it. If we want our subjects to smile genuinely in our portraits, we need to know what makes them happy. If we want to create an environmental portrait that tells a story about the subject, we need to know what that story is.

By involving the subject in our process of learning about them, we not only gain knowledge that we can use to inform our portrait, but we also gain their trust. With knowledge and trust, we can make our portraits much stronger and our work on the technical side can begin to sing.

 

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