News › Portraiture
Studio lighting is a big topic, but it doesn't need to feel overwhelming. Understanding basic lighting and posing can dramatically improve your studio portraits. Better yet, some of the lessons will translate to other portrait photography situations. A new video by Pye Jirsa of SLR Lounge delivers an overview of studio...
Fancy yourself a portrait photographer? Have you mastered posing and sculpting the light to showcase emotion and tell someone's story with a single frame? If so, we invite you to enter your best portrait and people photographs in our just-opened 2022 People & Portraits Photo Contest.
Co-hosted...
Adorama recently released a two-part video series about mixed lighting. What is mixed lighting? It's a challenging situation when a scene has different types of lights. Lights can be different colors, different brightness or both. It can be an unflattering light...
Photographer, educator and regular contributor to the Lensrentals blog, Zach Sutton, wrote an excellent lighting guide explaining how light placement affects how your subject appears. Sutton writes, 'When teaching basic lighting principles, I break down how to light a subject into having three basic variables – Intensity...
By the end of 2018, Sony had pretty much covered the basic needs of photographers with their 30 full-frame FE lenses. It could even be argued that they had done this much earlier, but the 24mm f/1.4 really did put a nice cap on their work over the last several years....
In the 150th episode of David Bergman's video series for Adorama, Two Minute Tips, he is tackling the topic of wide angle portraiture.
It's conventional wisdom that you shouldn't use wide angle lenses for portraiture. However, Bergman says that you certainly can shoot portraiture with wide lenses, but there are things...
Over at Red River Paper's blog, photographer Joel Grimes has written an interesting article about the famous 17th century artist, Rembrandt, and his lasting effect on lighting for different types of art, including photography. Grimes recalls taking art history courses as part of his BFA in photography at the University...
Whether you are working with natural light or artificial light, reflectors are a very powerful tool. When used correctly, they can act as their own light, which allows you a lighter, more flexible and much less expensive overall kit of gear. In fact, you can get collapsible reflectors which will easily slip away into...
You have a scene, good light and an interesting subject. You capture the shot and all is well. However, when you are looking at your images when you get home, you realize there was a very distracting element in the scene that ruins the photos. How frustrating! The fortunate thing is that you can learn to become more...
Many of us have heard of the term "portrait prime" to describe a fast lens. Photographers often reach for f/1.4, f/1.8 and f/2 lenses when shooting portraits to capture images with shallow depth of field and dreamy backgrounds. Sony Artisan Miguel Quiles often opts for a stopped down aperture instead, which is an unusual...
If you don't have a studio, or even if you do, you will likely spend a lot of time searching out great locations to shoot outdoor portraiture. The perfect location for a specific context is not always easy to find, but the video below from Mango Street should you give you plenty of great ideas.
For example, if you have...
In a new episode of Adorama's Spotlight video series, the camera is turned toward yet another Irish photographer. This time it's Cork-based David Creedon, who specializes in editorial portraiture and has been awarded many photography awards throughout his career.
Creedon has a deep connection to his subjects and he is...
While there are a lot of common and purpose-built light modifiers, such as umbrellas, softboxes and reflectors, there are also a lot of other modifiers you can use that are less common, including a flag.
In his newest video, Jay P. Morgan with The Slanted Lens shows us how to shape light with flags as part of his Laws...
When capturing portraits, one of the first decisions you need to make is what kind of light you want to use. Some photographers prefer using natural light. It's no-nonsense, relatively easy to work with and it can produce excellent results. Other photographers opt instead for using artificial light, oftentimes trying to...
Jessica Kobeissi is in Stockholm, Sweden along with Rachel and Daniel from Mango Street for a city portrait shoot.
For the gear-inclined, Jessica is shooting with her trusty Canon 5D Mark III with a Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. Rachel opted for the Canon 5D Mark IV with a 35mm prime.
In the behind the scenes video...
Photography is all about light. No matter what kind of photography you do, light is of central importance. Learning how to recognize, utilize and create good light (and shadows) is a critical skill.
Photographer Sean Tucker has started a new video series on his YouTube channel about good light. If you capture images...
Capturing the right look for skin tones is tough. Anyone who has captured portrait images knows how tricky it can be to nail exposure and color balance. However, when photographing subjects with darker skin tones, it's often even more challenging. Photographer and Adobe Creative Resident Aundre Larrow has 10 tips to...
Photographer and YouTuber Jessica Kobeissi has a lot of great videos aimed at all levels of photographer. Her latest video is more geared to beginners, particularly those who want to get into portraiture but don't yet have lighting gear. If you don't have lights, no problem, the sun works great! Outdoor portraiture is an...
Photographer and educator Marc Silber has produced three videos recently all centered around lighting. He regularly sits down with talented photographers to get tips straight from the pros, which is what he has done with the trio of videos below. Let's take a look and see what we can learn!
The first video is with...
Elinchrom has announced the ELB 500 TTL portable light, their most powerful portable light ever. The battery pack and light combine for 500Ws of power and advanced features such as TTL metering, high speed sync, active charging and built-in Skyport.
The ELB 500 is designed for professional photographers on the move who...