Use These Quick Tips From Tamara Lackey To Improve Your Portrait Photography

As you know, taking a compelling portrait is more difficult than just aiming your camera at someone and asking them to smile. There a lot of tiny details that are easy to overlook unless you are purposely keeping tabs on them. That being said, if you’re looking to get into portrait photography or just improve your craft a little more, award winning photographer Tamara Lackey delivers a handful of good tips you can use to do just that.

Simple Things You Can Do To Capture Better Portraits

The title of the video let’s you know there’s at least five useful pointers, but if you’re paying attention, you’ll catch a few bonus tips, too. But, before we get to the video, let’s take a quick look at some the topics covered in the video.

• Before you start shooting, check and adjust your camera settings–you don’t want to miss any good shots because you were too busy changing the settings.
• When shooting group photos try to keep faces on the same focal plane, especially when shooting at small apertures, to avoid some of the faces appearing sharp and others appearing soft.
• Pay attention to catch lights in the subject’s eye. Use a reflector to bounce light onto the subjects faces, keeping the catch lights consistent in all the subject’s eyes and adding the benefit of a little extra light to help fill in some of the shadows on their faces.
• Increasing the distance between you and your subject will help you get everything in focus when you’re working with a shallow depth of field.
• If you are shooting in good, natural light make sure you are not standing in between it and your subjects to avoid casting an unwanted shadow into your shot.
• The rule of thirds will always be there for you, take advantage of that.

5 Photography Tips With Tamara Lackey

[ via Vimeo ]