There are a lot of general rules about portrait photography, but rules are meant to be broken, and one photographer has shared how he does it meaningfully after taking over 100,000 photos. portrait.
In this video from Australian filmmaker and photographer Mitch Lally he shares the insights he has learned over the years and thousands of portraits. While it’s easy to take a “nice” portrait or one that exhibits good lighting, good composition, correct focal length, etc., it’s not just about being technically good.
As he shares with some of his examples, sometimes it is necessary to be different, such as using a low or high angle, or shooting with a wide angle lens and dealing with distortion. He plays with frames, layouts, and patterns to create images that are more unusual and memorable this way.
Lally also talked about looking at other photographers and realizing that the people that caught his attention the most were the ones who were able to capture the emotions in their photos. He shares some tips in the video on how to do some exercises to help you understand and capture the emotions in your self-portraits.
A popular technique tip he shares is to track hot spots in your photos. Specifically, the human eye is usually on the brightest part of the scene, and you don’t want the viewer to be distracted from what they have to see by viewing this part wrong.
Finally, he talks about simplicity. Usually it’s about lighting, posing and background, that’s all. If you can close these, you can close a portrait.
Lally offers lots of ideas and exercises from his own experience to help you really develop your portrait muscles. Check out the videos above and try them out.
Do you have some outstanding portrait tricks of your own? Share them in the comments below.
