One of the (many) things that differentiates pro shooters from hobbiests is that the pro shooter is always ready to capture that great shot. They don’t turn off their camera whenever they’re not actively shooting. They leave that lens cap off. They keep their finger near that shutter. And they keep looking for a photo op. After all, you never know when life will happen. If you’re not ready, you’ll miss the shot.

But this is an easy one for the amateurs to remedy.

A few weeks back we were commissioned to do a family portrait session for some friends of friends. We decided to make an afternoon of it and did some BBQing. We brought along our son (since we were also hanging out).

During the afternoon we spent half an hour or so in the backyard taking family photos. The little guy didn’t want any part of the family posed shots. So when we were done, we let mom and dad go inside and have a beer.

We stayed in the backyard and let the little guy play and have fun. As usual, he quickly forgot that I was chasing him around with a camera. We ran around and played guns (light stands make fantastic bazookas), and all was right in his world. I was happy because we went home with a big handful of photos that we were happy with. Mom and dad were too.

Up until this point everything went as planned. We were done shooting, got some great photos, and were just hanging out letting the little guys play. As soon as my wife let our son go to play, he made a bee line for our photo subject and laid a big hug on him. This moment literally lasted two seconds, because my son was off again and moving toward something else, probably a bug or a leaf or a blade of grass. Who knows.

Lucky for me I was ready for anything. Though we were done shooting, I left the camera turned on, the lens cap was in my pocket, and my finger was at the shutter. All I had to do was raise the camera to my eye, grab a quick focus, and snap the photo. I thought, “Hey, that’ll be cute” and moved on without a second thought.

We went back home and looked at the photos from the day. This one turned out to be our favorite. It was a favorite of the family we were there to shoot too. We even got a big print made up and displayed it at our booth at a local children’s festival. Countless people commented on this photo above all others in our portfolio.

These photos were taken with my Canon 20D fitted with a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens (I love this cheapo lens). Color and contrast adjustments were made in Lightroom.

So if you want to increase the number of keepers you shoot, a good place to start is being ready more. You’ll be amazed at how your photography will improve.

Allow me to share an experience I had from a recent portrait session. My wife and I shot a family in Austin back in early November. The little boy was 15 months old and walking just fine. Typically, when we photograph children that are older than newborns, we like to at least incorporate some outdoor settings into the shoot. Since we have a photojournalist style of photography, we decided to make the focal point of the session a playground where the family could play and we could capture the fun.

Let me start by saying that shooting people on swings is really difficult. Sure if they’re not moving then everything is great. But focusing on a target that is moving back to front is an acquired skill. Autofocus is out. Manual focus is the only way. I like to find a focus point, stand still, and wait for the person to swing through that depth-of-field and try to hit the shutter at precisely that moment. It works pretty well, but I still toss out about 30 percent of the shots because the focus is off. The wider the aperture, the harder this gets. Too bad I like wide apertures…

Then there was this shot. I don’t remember what I said, but it made all three bust out laughing. I’ve learned that to get that one great shot, sometimes you just have to go for it and the technical stuff be damned. There was no time to refocus; the moment would have passed. So I shut up and took the picture. The focus is off and the whole shot is soft.

When we were going through the shots from the session, we almost tossed this photo because of the focus. Instead, we recognized it as a capture of a family’s fun moment with a technical flaw. We decided to keep the photo and present it to the clients. Turns out they loved it. It ended up being one of the featured images in a custom designed 8×10 inch press printed book we made for them. Once they saw it, they ordered five copies as Christmas gifts. This made me especially happy I just took the picture.

So the moral of the story? You can pick apart your images from a technical standpoint all day long. You can put them on forums and let others shoot them down. But don’t forget to look beyond focus, white balance, and other details at what the photo really says. Sure, you should strive for technical perfection, but don’t let it hinder you. If I put this photo on a forum, it would probably be shredded as a horrible failure. But in the end it doesn’t really matter, because the clients loved it, and bought lots of them.

The post-processing on this image was done in Lightroom and Matt Kloskowski’s “Vintage New York” preset was applied to get the unique color scheme. You can get the preset over at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips.

This article is part of the ‘Portrait Lighting For Beginners’ series. This series is meant to help you go from a beginning photographer to making beautiful portraits.

Photo by cloudnine

You now know how to create low key portraits using dark tones. Now you’re ready to move on to mid key portraits. Mid key lighting is simply lighting so that the overall tones in the photograph are somewhere in the middle. Not too dark and not too bright. That’s it. To make your portrait model stand out, you’ll want her to be the brighter part of the image.

Like low key lighting, this style of lighting lends itself nicely to one light portraits. Sure you can use more lights and reflectors if you want to, but you don’t have to. You can position your subject and key light in such a way that the light hits both the subject and spills on to the background. Because your subject will be closer to the light, she will automatically be brighter than the background, attaining the look you want.

This article is part of the ‘Portrait Lighting For Beginners’ series. This series is meant to help you go from a beginning photographer to making beautiful portraits.

Image by Chakoo

Low key lighting is perhaps my favorite style of studio lighting. There’s just something about the mood and drama that is created when you have a dark background with the subject standing out against it. Combine this lighting with some creative and dramatic posing and you have the power to create images that will be cherished for generations.

The Setup

The idea behind low key lighting is simple: dark tones, minimal lighting, and emphasis on certain areas of the subject. This is the perfect lighting setup for those of you with just one light, because single light portraits look great in this lighting scheme. While I have several lights with me on any given portrait session, when I get going on the low key setup, usually all get turned off but one. If I do use more than one light, it’s usually just to fill in a little bit of shadow detail so that the image isn’t too contrasty.

Image 1
1/60th of a second

Conscious use of the shutter speed setting on your camera gives you the ability to get more creative with your photographs. Use a faster shutter speed and you’ll freeze action and get a sharp picture. Slow things down and you’ll get all or part of your image blurred and convey motion to the person looking at the photograph. This can be a powerful tool to help you tell the story behind the photo. But first, you’ve got to know what shutter speeds will give you the look you want. Read on.

Rule Of Thumb?

Image 2
1/30th of a second

Right about now you’re probably hoping for some sort of table that lists out shutter speeds, right? Well, unfortunately it’s not quite that simple. You see, unlike many other areas of photography where there are rules of thumb, this is one of those areas that requires experience and gut feeling. The reason is that the slower things are moving, the slower your shutter needs to be. Otherwise you won’t capture much motion. The best way I can think of to demonstrate this concept is through some photos. And I’ll use my favorite model for this article, my son.

Fast Motion

Let’s start out with the first image. This one is my boy on his first birthday, and he got to play with balloons for the first time. He was quite excited, and was whipping his arms around pretty wildly with those ribbons in his hands. I wanted to capture a little bit of that excitement, so I chose a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second, which was slow enough to get his arms blurred, but the rest of his body in sharp focus.

This article is part of the ‘Portrait Lighting For Beginners’ series. This series is meant to help you go from a beginning photographer to making beautiful portraits.

Image by johnlewis1513

Your first question right now is probably, “What the heck are these terms?” That’s understandable, especially if you’re new to portrait photography. So I’ll start this lesson by explaining what these poses are.

• Seven eighths view - This is a view of the subject that shows seven eighths of the subject’s face. Basically, this is a dead on view but with the face turned just slightly to one side.
• Three quarters view - This view shows three quarters of the subject’s face. Her face is turned 45 degrees from the camera and the far ear disappears from view.
• Two thirds view - This is probably the most commonly used facial position in portraiture. This is simply a position between seven eighths and three quarters. It provides for a nice comfortable pose without looking forced.

Lighting The Two Thirds And Three Quarters Views

This article isn’t just about telling you what these poses are. This is about telling you the best way to light them! Remember part six of this series on 45 degree lighting? If not, you might want to take a quick moment to go back and refresh your memory, because we’ll be using that idea again here.

This article is part of the ‘Portrait Lighting For Beginners’ series. This series is meant to help you go from a beginning photographer to making beautiful portraits.

Split lighting.
Clicky for larger

We continue our series on basic lighting setups with split lighting. Split lighting is simply lighting half of the subject’s face, while leaving the other half in complete shadow. This form of lighting creates a sense of drama in a portrait and really adds a little variety to a portfolio of images. While this isn’t my favorite of lighting setups, I do break it out from time to time to see what I’ll get. You can see here that even with a baby, you can create quite a mood with this type of lighting.

The image at left is another of my (then five month old) son. If you read the last section in this series on Profile Lighting, I told you that I caught my son in profile by mistake. This split lit shot was actually the shot I was going for when his little bobble head swung off in one direction to pay attention to God knows what, probably the cat.

Here’s how to set up a split lit shot.

This article is part of the ‘Portrait Lighting For Beginners’ series. This series is meant to help you go from a beginning photographer to making beautiful portraits.

Profile lighting

Next up in the series is profile lighting. This is a really simple lighting setup that really only requires one light, though you can add others if you want to. Like most lighting setups, feel free to add kickers, hair lights, whatever feels right to make your portraits pop!

Profile lighting isn’t used nearly as much as the other lighting setups. There are many reasons for this, but just to name a few, it can be less than flattering for many (think big noses) and just isn’t as visually interesting as some other setups. But used creatively, profile lighting can really make a great shot.

As I looked through my archives of photos, I realized I’m not a huge fan of this style, as this was the only shot in my entire collection. This shot only exists because my son moved his head right before taking the shot, and it came out as a profile shot. I need to make a point of dusting it off a little more often.

Here’s how to set it all up.

Sublime Light is a web site dedicated to teaching you to photograph people like a pro. For the latest articles, check out the home page.

Higher ratio (~7:1)
sebastian.yepes.in

Guess what…I hate it too!

As a photographer, sooner or later someone is going to use the term “lighting ratio” with you in a conversation. Many hobbiests don’t even know what this term means. In fact, many seasoned photographers still don’t have much of a grasp of what a lighting ratio is.

A lighting ratio is simply the difference in light level between the key (main) light and the fill light. Lighting ratios really only take into account two lights: the key light and the fill light. Any other lights you use in the image are simply accent lights that aren’t taken into account.

Here’s the simple formula:

Power output of first light divided by the second light times 1.695. That's it! So as long as you always keep a calculator in your camera bag, you're all set.

Now if you’re still with me, just forget that last paragraph of horse poo.

Sublime Light is a web site dedicated to teaching you to photograph people like a pro. For the latest articles, check out the home page.

DOF preview
button

There is a feature built into all digital SLR cameras that I know of that goes pretty well unused by many photographers. It’s possible that you didn’t even know it existed. If not, you may want to check it out the next time you break out your camera to shoot your next portrait. It’s the depth-of-field preview button, and it’s usually located near where the lens meets the camera body.

The depth-of-field preview (or DOF preview) button allows you to see what the depth-of-field will be for a given aperture before you press the shutter. As a quick refresher for our more novice readers, the wider your aperture (or the lower the number), the more narrow the depth-of-field will be (or the more the background will be blurred).