This week your photographic challenge is to take an ‘Environmental Portrait’ (or a portrait that is as much about the surrounds of your subject as it is the subject themselves).

Untitled

The idea came from my post last week – ‘How to Create Portraits that Captivate and Intrigue‘ where I explored the idea of portraits often becoming more interesting when you pay a lot of attention to the background (and foreground) of your portraits and place your subject within an environment that adds to the image.

The cask merchant

You might also like to take a look at my previous Introduction to Environmental Portraits tutorial.

"I Am..." An Engineer

The key is to take a great portrait – but instead of going for a background that is not distracting or blurred it out or zooming in to remove it – put that subject in a setting which tells something about your subject.

Perhaps you’d like to photograph someone at work, or a child in their bedroom, or someone in a sporting dressing room preparing for a game…. really it is totally up to you!

Proud X in his bedroom

Once you’ve taken and selected the ‘Environmental Portrait’ image/s that you’d like to share – upload them to your favourite photo sharing site or blog and either share a link to it or – embed them in the comments using our embed tool to do so.

Ricky's world

If you tag your photos on Flickr, Instagram, Twitter or other sites with Tagging tag them as #DPSENVIRONMENTALPORTRAIT to help others find them. Linking back to this page might also help others know what you’re doing so that they can share in the fun.

Also – don’t forget to check out some of the great shots posted in last weeks challenge – 1 Subject 3 Shots challenge where there were some great shots submitted.

Read more from our Reader Questions Category