Do you want to improve your portrait photography?
Today I spent time digging through the Digital Photography School archives (there are now over 600 tutorials and articles) and noticed that we’ve covered the topic of Portrait Photography from a large variety of angles. I thought it would be useful to list some of the more popular portrait photography tips all in the one place.
I’ve chosen 19 of our most popular portrait photography articles and have assembled them below.
So if you’re interested in improving your portrait photography – grab a cup of coffee, set aside a little time and enjoy. If you enjoy these make sure you subscribe to get more via email or RSS.
How to Take Portraits – 19 Portrait Photography Tutorials from Our Archives
1. 10 Tips to Take Stunning Portraits
This recent post (one of the most popular that we’ve ever published on DPS) gives 10 fairly general tips on how to take portraits with the ‘wow factor’.
It’s all about adding variety to your portraits by doing things like altering your perspective, adding a prop, experimenting with eye contact and getting your subject out of their comfort zone (to name just a few).
It picks up ideas found in many of the following tutorials and would make a great place to start if you’re looking for an introduction to the topic.
2. 10 More Tips for Stunning Portrait Photography
In this followup to the last tutorial we extend the idea of adding variety to your shots.
It explores framing, wide angle lenses, backgrounds and experimenting with focusing.
All in all this post takes this mini series to 20 portrait photography techniques that have been read by hundreds of thousands.
I’d love to hear any thoughts you’d have on other techniques that you use to add variety to portraits in the comments on this post.
3. Give Your Subject Space to Look Into
This technique is basic but can have a real impact upon your shots.
Framing your portraits so that your subject has room to look into gives a shot balance and helps draw the eye of those viewing the image into the image.
Try it for yourself – but don’t forget, sometimes ‘rules’ like this one can be broken with great effect also – so experiment with that too!
I Love picking the brains of professional photographers and this is what I did in this post in which a portrait photographer shared with me four parts of his shooting workflow.
The tips are simple yet effective – I particularly like the way that he shoots from slightly under the eye line of your subject – a technique that causes a little interesting debate in the comments of this post.
Drop by and tell us what you think!
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