Posts Tagged ‘portrait photography techniques’
digital portrait lighting © Tim Pannell Photography
Where do you start when you want to help people take better photographs of their children?
I remember when I started out taking pictures when I was in High School I knew absolutely nothing. I was a blank slate. I had nothing.
I had friends that had been taking pictures for years, so I relied heavily on them to show me the ropes. Them and whatever crappy photo books I could get my hands on at the time.
I learned your basics about exposure, f stops, shutter speeds, lens choices and that was about it.
I shot scenics and some pictures (lousy ones) of my girlfriend at the time. When I look back I’m completely embarrassed at how bad my stuff
Portrait Lighting Setup
was at the time.
My lens choices were crap, my angles were all wrong and even my exposures could have been tidied up a bit.
I didn’t know anything about cropping, but mostly I didn’t know a thing about light or the quality of light.
I didn’t realize at the time just how important great light is to an image. That’s really what separates the men from the boys. LIGHT!
My friends did the best they could. they taught me everything they knew. They got their info from other friends and other crappy photo books that were available.
I’m gonna skip ahead a few years. Suffice it to say that I really enjoyed photography, but had yet to be exposed to anything that really helped me a lot.
I decided to turn pro when I was in college for Design Engineering and Economics. I was going to go on and get an Architect’s license after that.
I had about a year left and made a huge change in direction when I decided out of the blue that I really just wanted to be a photographer.
I started out shooting weddings and engagement portraits. It was fun for about a week or two and then it started getting really repetitive and boring.
I began pouring through commercial photography books, Communication Arts, Photography Showcase and the Black Book of Photography.
I would spend weeks and even months going over the images in those books one by one, identifying all the images I liked and then trying to understand what it was I liked about them.
This is when I really started to learn about the importance of great light. I would then pick an image that I loved and then I’d go out and do my best to reproduce that image.
This wasn’t for my portfolio, it was just an exercise to learn about lighting. I set about to learn what kind of photography moved me so consequently I would know what avenue of photography to pursue.
So, ask yourself, what kind of photographs have you seen that you really like? Have you actually seen great photography of kids?
Do you like images that look like classic portraiture or do you like images that have more of an editorial feel? Do you prefer images that lean a bit more towards a commercial look?
Maybe you like a little bit of everything and that’s fine too. The more you play with photography, the more you’ll come to recognize your particular vision and way of seeing things. This is the fun part!!
As you learn how to apply different photographic principles to your images, you’ll be able to see photographs and figure out how to go about producing those types of images. That’s at least the ultimate goal.
Seek out great photography, learn all of the child photography tips you can get your hands on, get yourself a target to aim at and let the adventure and fun begin.
Chris © Tim Pannell Photography
Would you like to be able to shoot beautiful portraits of your kids instead of going to some schmaltzy cookie cutter photo joint in the mall? So many people settle for these kind of “one size fits all” portraits because they don’t think they can afford to go to a real portrait photographer’s studio.
Assuming you already have a decent digital SLR camera, you could buy some lighting equipment for the same price or less than you’d spend having a legitimate portrait photographer do the work for you.
There are quite a few common misconceptions about photography and equipment and the kind of lighting power someone might need to do simple portraits.
I do use pretty expensive lighting for all of my commercial work, but for simple portraits I have to dial my strobes to their absolute lowest output and many times that’s still too much light for my needs and I end up diffusing the light source another 1 – 2 stops.
This image of my friends’ son was shot in my living room 
using one main light and 2 accent lights or “kicker lights”.
You can produce this kind of lighting setup easily against a paper background, or even a wall in your home.
I shot it a f 2 @ 1/200th of a second with an 85 mm f1.4 lens on a Canon Mark II body. I exposed for the diffused highlights on Chris’ face and then adjusted my “kicker lights” until I got the highlights the way I wanted them.
I frequently shoot wide open or close to it because I like the ethereal quality it gives the overall image. It’s a great illustration of the concept that not everything in an image has to be or should necessarily be tack sharp.
This is very similar to how the human eye works as well. Not everything you look at is sharp. A relatively small area in your field of vision is actually sharp and then everything else falls off rather quickly into being out of focus.
There are quite a few inexpensive lighting setups out on the market that have more than enough power to produce images like this. Do your research before you buy any of them, make sure they have good warrantees and that the company has been around more than a couple of months.
The great thing about digital is that once you have the camera and lenses, it costs you nothing to shoot and experiment. With film you could spend thousands and thousands of dollars playing around with lighting setups until you found something that you really liked.
The creative possibilities that we now have at our fingertips because of digital cameras and photoshop are endless. One word of caution though……don’t use photoshop as a crutch.
It’s still just as important today as it was decades ago to become a master at lighting and exposure control even though it’s easy to “fix” things in post.
