Portrait tips: 20 quick ideas for better pictures of people

Portrait Tips: Inside or outside?

1. Start inside
Where you shoot depends on what style you're offering, the time of year and what the client expects. But starting the shoot inside is a great way to get everyone, particularly kids, accustomed to your camera. If you start your shoot in a field, for instance, you won't see the kids again.

2. Create a black background
A quick and easy technique you can use to get a few solid shots in the bag straightaway is to turn off all the lights off in the foyer. Next, ask the family to stand about three feet in from the doorway. By exposing for your subject's faces you will underexpose the dimly lit foyer behind them, thus creating a clean, black background behind the family.

3. Good backgrounds are everywhere
Clean backgrounds, of course, are one of the key elements of a successful portrait. Some houses may have amazing wallpaper or glass rooms that can work well to this end, but if you're stuck, use the back of a couch.

This works particularly well with kids. Simply drag a sofa near a doorway and turn the couch around. Sit your subjects in front of it so that you have a nice, solid block of colour, which is the sofa back behind them.

Because the sofa is being lit by light reflected in from outside, the colour will be rich and warm. Even a black leather couch works nicely in this regard, he says.

4. Make the room more spacious
If shooting indoors and the room feels cramped around your subject, try placing your subject in a corner and shooting from a very low angle. This vantage point gives emphasis to the lines where the floor meets the wall, which will travel from one central point out to the lower corners of your frame, giving the exaggerated appearance of wide open space. Using a wideangle lens for this type of shot will enhance the effect even further. 

5. What to wear
Shooting outdoors, it can be hard in winter to find backgrounds with colour. Brett will instead ask clients wear something colourful or stripey to give the image some extra visual interest and warmth. Conversely, in summer colour is everywhere, from the golden light to the verdant green or floral backdrops.

To keep from confusing an image with too much colour or pattern, ask your sitter to keep it simple with single colours and patterns. And always ask them to bring a change of clothes, regardless of the season.

6. Make a frame with foliage
We've all used a canopy of leaves to create a frame around a subject in our compositions, but you can take this technique to the extreme by getting down low and shooting from the ground looking up. Try using individual blades of grass, wildflowers and other stray ground foliage to frame your subjects within the frame. The low vantage point gives dramatic emphasis to the subject, and the bug's eye view of the grass in the foreground creates an otherworldliness.

7. Make a day of it
It's not enough simply to bring your subjects into their garden or down to the local park and take their photograph. A good portrait captures a genuine expression, an unguarded moment, and these typically only come when someone is having a great time and forgets about the camera.

Instead, plan days out with your subjects. Think about your shoots as an experience – a walk through the woods, a picnic with family, a day at the beach – that everyone is sharing. People let their guard down, you'll get more natural pictures, and at the end of the day everyone feels like they've had a fun day out rather than their picture taken.

8. Controlling exposure
When you move from indoors to outdoors you are ceding your element of control over the light. If it's sunny and conditions are high-contrast, zooming into your subject will give you a more balanced exposure. A telephoto zoom such as Brett's trusty 70-200mm is great for this very purpose on outdoor shoots. The more scenery you want to include in your background, the harder it will be to get an even exposure because of all the ambient light you're letting into your camera at wider focal lengths.

9. Best apertures
Shooting outdoors is particularly tough because it's often a blanket of colour. If you shoot your subjects at f/8, they're not going to be distinguished from the background. Use an aperture of about f/2.8 in your outdoor portraits so you can achieve minimum depth of field.

10. Use bounced flash indoors
Shooting indoors, you'll likely want to use flash, particularly if your shot is posed. If you set a full aperture, an average shutter speed of about 1/60sec and bounce off-camera flash light from the ceiling or wall at your background (direct flash light will give you harsh results), you should be able to capture well-lit portraits at low ISOs of 100 or 200.

Portrait Tips: Candid or posed?

1. Facial expressions
Remember that in addition to posing your subject's body, you are also posing their face. And a fleeting expression captured on camera takes on much more significance than it may have actually meant in the moment. A playful frown could wrongfully stand the test of time as a sign of the sitter's personality. So for this reason you need to think about what is photogenic and what isn't.

2. Sit them down
If you're going for a tight head-and-shoulders shot, ask your subject to sit down. They'll feel more comfortable and relaxed, but equally it keeps them from wandering away from your camera.

3. Trust your subject
The most natural-looking poses are often those your subject has willingly adopted in between waiting instruction from you. Pay close attention to your subjects even when you're not directing them. Study their body language. Do they tense up when you ask them to strike a certain pose?

Try giving them more general direction, like 'walk over to the wall and turn back towards me,' to see how they interpret the suggestion. Most people aren't aware of which angles and poses will present themselves in the most flattering way, but showing that you trust them in this manner will put your subjects more at ease. Then, once you've found a pose that works for you both, you can fine tune it if needed.

4. Encourage interaction
For genuine candids, try to encourage interaction amongst your subjects. Chat to them. Ask questions. If you can get everyone talking (hopefully to each other) you can use this time to photograph not the speaker (as everyone expects you are doing) but the reactions of others. These will often be great, emotive images.

5. Profiles encourage
Many times a profile shot can reveal just as many insights into your subject's identity in that it gives the viewer a truer impression of what someone looks like. We've all cleverly hidden double chins and wrinkles through careful camera placement and lighting, but profile shots make our warts and all harder to conceal. Of course, if your subject isn't comfortable with his warts and all, a portrait in profile should probably be avoided. It's worth remembering, too, that profiles work best when you have backgrounds that are a stark contrast to your subject's skin tones.

6. What do they do?
Another great way to give more insight into your subjects’ identity is to photograph them with some of the things they use or live with everyday. You might photograph a carpenter in his studio, or a soldier in uniform, for example. With family shoots, try to incorporate some of these everyday items into your compositions. 

But always ask before taking an environmental portrait such as this. Some people are sensitive about where they live and don't want their house visible in a picture.

7. Size and scale
Try to strike the right balance between size and scale. Remember that your subject's face is still key to the success of your image, so if you’re opting for a wider focal length to capture a candid shot make sure you give an appropriate indication of the space around your subject, at the same time staying close enough that we can see their face. In other words, the person is still the most interesting element of the picture; so don't lose them in the frame! 

8. Think about colour combinations
When arranging your subjects in a group portrait the first thing most photographers see is height. We put taller people at the back and shorter people in the front. But it's not until after we look at the picture on the computer that we notice subjects with clashing colours standing next to each other.

Try to remember the colour wheel. Often what's instantly noticeable, like height, is invisible behind a distracting mishmash of colour.

9. Fake a candid
If you're nervous about taking candid portraits of people, there are ways to create the illusion of one. Just ask your subject to look at something beyond the frame. This can very easily look like you happened to catch someone deep in thought, but at the same time your subject's long-distance gaze can inadvertently direct the viewer's eye out of the frame. 

10. Sleeping beauty
The complete opposite of asking someone to pose, try photographing someone when they’re asleep (with their permission, of course!). We’re at our most comfortable when we’re asleep and dreaming, and a face at rest can be very revealing. It can be the ultimate candid portrait.

You can read more of Brett's portrait photography tips on Individual vs Group Shots, Flash vs Natural Light and how to photograph babies, children and teenagers in Issue 113 of Digital Camera, on sale now. 

You can see more of Brett's images or sign up for one of his workshops on Brett's website, or you can follow Brett on Twitter @brettharkness.