7 Tips for Creative Portrait Photography

Play With Shadows

Shape and strength of shadows varies with the type of light and the angle from which it hits the subject. If used properly shadows can create drama. How prominent the shadows in your frame will be a thing to decide on a case to case basis. There are times when you would want the shadows to be more prominent than your subject casting the shadow.

Make Use of Reflections

Glossy floor surfaces, water, mirrors, windows etc are all good candidates for getting a nice reflection of your subject / scene. Reflections could add an extra dimension to your image making it stand out from the crowd. Note that reflections on different urfaces have different feel and texture.

Splash Some Colors

When it comes to drawing attention of the viewers, there is nothing like vibrant and contrasting colors. Add some that match your scene and see the difference. Colorful props, clothing, makeup, accessories etc are all good candidates.

Highlight Textures

Textures are great, it gives your photos character. If you have textures in your scene try to make it prominent. Make it stand out; match it between your subject and background. It doesn’t stop there you could do pretty amazing stuff playing with textures in post production.

Capture Movement

Play with your shutterspeed settings, get out your flash, find out what high speed sync, first / second curtain sync is and what it can do. Take full control and switch your camera into manual mode. Really capture your subjects movement in you frame to show the action. Admit there’ll some blurs and exposure issues and all but keep tweaking the settings and you will definitely get the hang of it and believe me it’s worth the effort. Try some shots panning, zooming with variations of first / second curtain sync and now you are in action zone.

Un - Focus

Focus is a great way to add interest to any subject / scene. What we are all familiar doing is getting the background out of focus to make our subjects stand out in the picture. Why not do the opposite and play with focus, it could make an interesting picture out of an ordinary scene by adding an element of mystery to it.

Props / Accessories

Think of props or accessories that could go with the scene, something that would add value to the scene and not only that it should be something that naturally belongs to the situation. Someone viewing your picture should not feel like that object was purposefully added to the scene. It could be anything something to place your subject in, or on, or under, or around or anything for your subject to hold. Especially useful when you are not sure how to place your models hands in a particular frame.

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