For me, portraiture is one of the most inspiring genres of photography. I also find it pretty difficult to master, there’s so much to learn – but it’s what makes it so fun and appealing. In this video, photographer Jamie Windsor shares nine fantastic tips for giving a new dimension to your portraiture work. He focuses on studio shots, environmental portraits and street photography, and shares some precious advice to help you get the best out of your portraits.
From press photographer to capturing ailing children: John Maniaci’s Journey
“This is the last picture where the family photo will have 5 children instead of 4…” John Maniaci tells me, before trailing off, letting the meaning of that simple sentence sink in. “What I’m doing in the children’s hospital is incredibly powerful.”
Some photographers invest their lives in finding beauty in the most unlikely of places. For John Maniaci, that turned out to be an intensive care unit for children at UW Health.
Full Time vs Fake Photographer, can you spot the difference?
In this very non-scientific exercise by Seattle based portrait photographer Ben Lucas, we see if subjects can tell the difference between photograph created by a full time working pro vs a paid actor.
The camera, lighting and setup is identical for each “photographer”, to try and illustrate that creating a portrait is about more than just the technical. You need to be able to connect with your subjects to bring out their personality and real emotion.
How to shoot portraits under pressure
In the ideal world, you have an infinite amount of time during photoshoots to tweak the lighting and camera settings until everything is absolutely perfect.
Unfortunately, that’s not the reality of it. Oftentimes we’re left with too little time in too small of a space and all we can do is try to get the best picture possible.
Here to share how she makes the most out of inconvenient situations is portrait photographer Victoria Will for a BTS video from CreativeLive.[Read More…]
7 Tips For Taking Breathtaking Travel Portraits
If you think about taking your camera with you to your holiday, this article gives you a insight about how to get some breathtaking travel portraits. All what I am writing about are tips and tricks from my own experience, travelling the world with my camera. From preparations, equipment to talking with a stranger this post covers all basics what you need to get out and enjoy making your own travel portraits.
Elena Shumilova A.K.A Photographer Mom Shares Her Techniques For Photographing Kids
Russian Photographer and mom Elena Shumilova became kinda famous when photos of her kids and family went viral in early 2014. In total her photos were views over 60,000,000 times (and I guess they were viewed outside her profile some 60 million more).
Something about her photography struck a chord with almost everyone, photographers, mothers, father, young and old. I guess the innocence and feeling of childhood that projected from her photos were just irresistible.
Elena shared some great advice on photographing kids with the crew at Smugmug and agreed to share them with DIYP readers.
Quick, Clever and Easy Method to Correct Skin Tones in Portraits
When shooting portraits, getting the right skin tones is not a trivial task. Differences in lighting, skin tan and other factors can create uneven skin tones which our brains usually compensates in ‘real life’, but they can be quite distrusting when looking in a portrait.
Photographer Michael Woloszynowicz shares quite an easy method for correcting skin tones that automates the hardest part of the process – getting the correct skin tone to correct with.[Read More…]
Touching Group Portrait For Sick Friend Done With Shaved Heads
There aren’t many single moments in life that you can lay your finger on and say that your life before that moment is completely different from the life after that moment. Discovering you have cancer is definitely a life changing moment. And is it in that moment that you need your supporting environment – friend and family – the most.
Last month, one of Gerdi McKenna’s friends wrote an email asking Gerdi friends to come and make a group portrait for her. Having diagnosed with breast cancer, all of Gerdi’s friends accepted the invitation.
But, this was not a trivial group shot. To show their empathy, Gerdi’s friends all shaved their heads prior to posing for the portrait, which despite the sad circumstances is one of the most touching portraits I’ve seen.[Read More…]
How To Take The Ultimate Selfie
Time magazine just named Makati City, Philippines as The Selfie Capital of the world. And as a proud Filipino I have done my shares of selfie in the interweb.
There are tons of selfies in the internet taken using a smartphone, but those do not compare to the greate selfies I have seen was on Flickr, where people take the time to light or setup their shots and use “real cameras” to take their selfies, just to name one that I always follow is Dustin Diaz’s flickr.
There are a lot of ways to do a selfie using your dslr, so to each his own, this is a quick tutorial on how I do my selfies. [editor note: Laya’s Selphies are some of the best I’ve ever seen so you may wanna hit the jump see what he has to offer][Read More…]
How To Take Magical Family Candids
Some time ago the wonderful images of Elena Shumilova went viral. Suddenly there were dogs, rabbits and cute children everywhere. And I have to say – these images are extraordinary – we instantly begin to dream and to fell fuzzy. Something is going on with us while looking at these images. In some way, her work is magical.
After a while threads started popping up in forums, asking about the secrets and post production in Elena’s work.
The stuff I usually do is definitely different from soft warm portraiture, also I am not the photographer on the team – my job in the process has to do more with the technical planning of shots, lighting and retouching.
As a father of a two-year-old girl, owner of a DSLR and with a girlfriend who’s blogging, I had to expand my principles. So I started analyzing Elenas images and wrote some key elements in her images down. I did not want to copy her compositions, or wanted to recreate her image ideas – which is technically not possible, because I don’t have a big dog, or rabbit around.
The idea was “applying some of her key elements on a normal family trip”.
Last weekend the family went out, the light was quite pleasing, I had my D800 and a 85mm f1.8 lens with me and so I was following my own “ basic shumilova-rules”:[Read More…]
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