Improve Your Portrait Photos Fast - See the Light!

Tired of seeing black eye sockets and whitened out faces in that last series of snaps you took at the family outing? It's easy to get a much better result if you just look at the light. No light, no picture, but what counts is the light quality and direction. And the good part is you can use natural lighting just as effectively inside as well as outside. A little careful seeing before you click the shutter is all that's required.

Light has quantity, quality (contrast), direction and color.

Generally, the more light there is, the better. The greater the quantity the faster you can shoot. Too little light causes problems with long exposures (movement shows in your picture), and in really low light levels in digital cameras "noise", little specks, can appear in the shadows. A good amount of light gives you more control over how you interpret your subject. You can capture an image in low light conditions by increasing the ISO number, but that brings more noise and usually an unsatisfactory picture. The "snap" goes from the "snapshot".

Quality. Hard? Soft? Somewhere in between?

In a nutshell, find a soft light coming from the side. Hard, contrasty light (direct sun) is the enemy of successful people shots. Overhead it causes dark eye sockets and unwanted textures on the face. Full on the face gives squinty eyes as the subject finds the light too bright to look into. Both positions give nasty, hard and unflattering shadows. And make sure there are no streaks of hard light and shadow across the face.

This high contrast between the light and dark parts becomes too great for the image recorder in your camera to handle, so the bright bits white out, losing detail, and dark bits go too dark, ditto. If you try to compensate on one side, the other becomes even worse. Professionals have special reflectors and diffusers for light management, but there are other ways.

How to control light direction

As it's hard to shift the sun, shift the subject. The idea is to stop direct light striking the model, so find a shady area, under a porch, tree, beside of a house, where the sun is no longer directly involved. The light will still have direction, but now is much softer and more flattering. Another idea, if the sun's not overhead, is to turn the subject's back to it. This is bit more dangerous as sunlight in the lens causes flare, with loss of contrast and colour, so make sure there is no direct sunlight into the lens.

Now the model's face may be a bit too dark, and to overcome that your camera could well have a backlight compensation setting on it. This opens up the lens a stop or so to let more light in. If not, find the exposure compensation control (read the handbook!) and add a stop of exposure yourself. The rewards can include a nice halo around your subject's head. But many problems are solved if there are clouds around. These are great light softeners, and if it's a partly cloudy day, you're in luck.

Color and how we see it.

Color temperature is too big a subject to explore here, but you have around seven controls for color balance on your camera. Sunlight, shade, tungsten and the others are all there to allow catering for various colors in light. The human brain does not interpret color changes very well, and provided the red, green and blue frequencies that make up white light are there in reasonably similar amounts, you see white, even though your camera may see something else. With portraits a slightly warmer color is always better than a cool or blue tinged one. Experiment to see under what conditions each setting is most effective.

And what about inside?

The laws of physics never change, inside or out, film or digital. Soft light is good, and the best is from a window. Put your subject close to it. You can have them looking outside, or perhaps turned towards you. Use a piece of white card or similar to reflect a little light back into the face from the darker side. And there you have it.

Now go shoot some

So before you next have to face a crowd of family and relatives all wanting a fine picture of themselves, spend a few minutes with a willing helper and try a few ideas out. Really look at the results, and figure out how they can be improved. Is the light coming from the right direction? Is it soft enough? No hard shadows? Flattering? Experiment. You will be amazed how a little investment of time will show up in vastly improved images. Portrait shooting is fun and a successful one is a great reward for yourself and the model. Happy shooting!

What Should We Pay To Improve Our Photography?

Many of us, when looking to improve our photography, spend money on equipment. We think that the better/newer the equipment the better our photography. We pay plenty of money because we believe that the equipment will enable us to create better photographs. Most of the time our photography remains the same, only the equipment, and our bank accounts, have changed.

What do we need to create a photograph? We need a camera, a lens and light sensitive material to record light. If you are using a pinhole camera you can dispense with the lens.

What do we need to create a GOOD photograph? An understanding of the craft of photography can help. The more we understand about the craft of photography the more depth we can bring to our pictures. If we can't teach ourselves about the craft, a class/workshop with a good teacher will help us enormously and is well worth the cost. But there's something else that won't cost us anything.

What do we need to pay to create GOOD photographs and yet cost us nothing out of our pockets? ATTENTION!

Our cameras record EVERYTHING that we place into our framing and, assuming that there is enough light being reflected or transmitted by the objects in the frame, whether we see it or not it's there!

We see with discrimination. We see what's interesting to us and pay attention to that, usually at the expense of everything else in the frame. On the other hand our cameras see indiscriminately and are interested in nothing.

We have to learn to see like our cameras record our photographs, without discrimination. Although we need to concentrate on what's interesting and important to us, we also need to pay attention to everything else in the frame. If we don't pay attention to everything else, we get things in the photograph that we don't want in the photograph..like poles growing out of peoples heads!

Pay attention to EVERYTHING in the frame. If we look at our photograph after the exposure was made and see something that wasn't there, we weren't paying attention. Things that weren't in our viewfinder prior to our exposure don't magically appear in the photograph after the exposure was made. There's nothing wrong with a pole growing out of someone's head if that's what we saw in our viewfinder before our exposure was made and decided to keep it there.

We need to look at ALL of the picture in our viewfinder and organize it. We should be filling the frame with the elements of the composition that are important to us and paying attention to how those elements relate to each other then, when everything feels right to us, we make the exposure. By doing this at the very least we'll have a well composed picture. At the most, if we are true to OUR feelings about whatever we are photographing, we'll not only have a well composed picture we'll have a picture filled with feeling.

We can't force feeling into a picture. A picture filled with feeling is usually an automatic result of examining what's important to us as individuals and including those important compositional elements, and their relationships, in our photographs.

If you want to improve your photography, before plunking down a pile of cash to pay for that new state of the art super mega-expensive piece of equipment that you think will improve your pictures, try paying attention. It'll cost you nothing and I believe that our thoughtful attention is the best investment we can make when it comes to our photographs.

How To Improve Photography Skills

In the past, photography was a very expensive hobby. Every photograph you took went onto a piece of photographic film. Film comes in a roll. That roll needs to be processed and the photographs produced. How do you mprove photography skills when even a film roll is so expensive?

It costs a lot of money to process and print a roll of film - especially if you have more than 10 rolls a week to feed your passion. But the good thing about that high cost was that people took time to learn the basics of photography.

In today's digital age, it does not really matter if you have poor pictures. The only thing you suffer from would be disappointment. It costs you nothing. So, many bad habits are formed.

Here are five simple tips to help you take better photos:

1. Hold you camera steady

Thanks to modern technology, the "camera shake" problem has been solved. But if you really want sharp photos, you do have to hold the camera steady. Relax. Use both hands, and rest your elbows on your chest. How to improve photography skills depend on how steady your hands are.

2. Put your light source behind you

Always know where the light is coming from. If it is the sun, then make sure it is behind you so that the light falls on your subject. Or you might want the light from the side. But never take a photo with the light source in front of you and behind your subject.

3. Move in closer

The best shots are the simple shots. Move yourself close to the subject so that you get a tighter, more focused image. Removing image clutter helps capture better photos.

4. Choose the right format

Which way you hold the camera will determine whether the image is in landscaped (horizontal) or portrait (vertical) format. For tall things, use a vertical format, example, trees, tall buildings.

5. Include life in your photos

How to improve photography skills if you only take one kind of subject? If you merely take landscapes, it could appear dull. Try to capture some people or even animals in your shots. You can even use yourself (using a timer) if there is really no one else around. Another advantage is that including a person will give a perspective of size to the photo.