10 Portrait Photography Tips for Capturing Beautiful Faces

The difference between a fantastic photographer and a mediocre one is the ability to use the most straightforward techniques to take stunning photos. To become excellent in photography, you need to harness the portrait photography tips for capturing beautiful faces. So how do you do this? Let’s dive in!

What is portrait photography?

Portrait photography is a branch of photography that focuses on people. In this branch, you have to work with different individuals, representing challenges of thinking outside the box. There are several portrait categories: creative, corporate, family, and street. Portrait photography consists of a combination of technical and creative skills. The technical aspect of portrait photography includes using aperture settings or lighting angles. The clever part may involve showing your model how to pose and staging your background, colors, and patterns.

Here are 10 Portrait Photography Tips for Capturing Beautiful Faces

Change your perspective

A typical portrait is taken where the camera lens aligns at eye level with your subject. How about switching things up and taking your photos from another angle. You can either take the portrait from a side angle or from above. Ask your muse to lie down when shooting from above, then downward position your camera. You can also stand from a higher platform, such as a balcony, and ask your subject to look up the camera.

Another angle you can use is lying low and shooting up. Or stand adjacent and take side-angle pictures.

Work on your lighting

Lighting makes all the difference in photography. Learning how to make slight contrasts, use soft light, side light, front light, etc., will allow you to create images that suit different tastes and styles.

It is essential to figure out which lighting angles work best to achieve the imagery you have in mind. If you want flat and bland images, you can use front light. For more dimensions and portraits that reflect a mood, use sidelight. We suggest using backlighting for more sultry, dark, and mysterious pictures.

Set the stage

As a portrait photographer, you are the director of your movie, one of the portrait photography tips is to convey emotions and a message. That will mean setting up clothes, makeup, background, lighting, and the model’s posture in harmony with the portrait. Make sure patterns and colors are connected and do not clash with your background. When a clash happens, you get an overcrowded and unappealing picture.

Choose better lenses

Not all lenses are suitable for taking stunning portraits. There are lenses on the market designed purposely for portrait photography, and we suggest purchasing those for more realistic results. Lens can be expensive, so can camera gear but this hasn’t got to be, especially if you have a friend who is a photographing enthusiast, so if you don’t want to get him a lens then find gifts for photographers under $25 and you will be surprised what you can get.

The most common focal length for portrait photography is the 85mm lens, with a wide aperture of around f/1.2 or f/1.8. The lens works with natural light portraits. Although it can be used in the studio, it is better to shoot photographs outside. Another lens we highly suggest is the 50mm, which has a wider aperture of f/1.4 or f/1.8. It is great for environmental portraits where a lot is going on in the background of subjects—for example, taking photos in an office or a public park.

Know where to focus

The focal point of portrait photography is the subject’s eyes. You should focus on the areas you want to catch attention to. If you want more focus on the lips of your muse, obscure other parts of their body.

Shoot Candidly

If you notice your model’s poses only make the portraits awkward and unnatural, how about shooting candidly. Allow your subject to engage in an activity they love. For example, you are playing football or reading a book.

Fill the frame

Another trick to stunning portrait photography is filling the frame. It means making your subject the main focus of the photo. Hence, intriguing effect and viewers, making it impossible to look away. It also creates a sense of intimacy and immediately draws people to the subject’s face. You can use a mixture of shadows and light to convey a message.

Tweak camera settings

Portrait photography requires having manual control of your camera settings like the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. The ISO, aperture, and shutter speed settings work together to perfect your portrait photos.

ISO: Helps you decide how light or dark your photos turn out. You should set your ISO settings between 100 and 400 for optimal results.

Aperture: Aperture affects the quality of your pictures. Using a large aperture will blur imagery behind and in front of your focused subject. A small aperture may give you a sharper image, but your subject will have to be far off.

Shutter Speed: Understand the effect of shutter speed on your images, especially exposure to light. If you use longer shutter speeds, your camera sensors gather a lot of light, giving you brighter photos. On the other hand, shorter shutter speeds produce darker images. Ideally, you should defer your in-camera meter to get a center reading in the meter.

Make your portraits real.

Remember that you are working with humans and not inanimate objects. So do your best to show basic human emotions like sadness, joy, anger, etc., in your photos so viewers can connect with them. If possible, capture all the ranges of emotions your models go through as the slightest change can affect the mood of your portrait.

Editing

After taking the photos, the next thing is to ensure proper retouching, so your images do not lose their quality. You can use editing software like Photoshop and Lightroom to give your pictures a nice touch. The software can help you fix things you may have missed during shooting.

Portrait photography can be a highly rewarding type of photography, as it captures people in their most natural state. However, taking great portraits requires some knowledge of lenses, camera settings, and how to pose your model. In this article, we have provided some basic tips for taking stunning portrait photos that will impress your friends and family.