James Paterson offers expert advice for photographing people, from the ideal camera settings and kit you need, to how to make your subjects look their very best
There are certain special moments as a photographer, such as when you plug your memory card into your computer and start to look through a set of portraits, and you come across one that perfectly captures your subject. It’s a wonderful feeling, like catching stardust. But equally there’s often disappointment. Little mistakes in lighting, focusing or framing can undo all your hard work. Over the next few pages we’ll explore a host of techniques for people photos. Whether you’re interested in natural light portraits or vibrant flash-lit photos, low-key images or bold black and whites, you’ll find advice that will help you cut out the frustration and take beautifully polished portraits.
Portraiture is unique to photography in that – as long as our subject is amenable – we can move them into position, pose them, light them how we want, just as if arranging objects in a still life photo. There’s a level of control to it, things we can plan out, techniques we can hone. But no matter how prepared we are, there’s always that unknowable X-factor – how our subject will react to the camera and to us. Form a connection and we stand a much better chance of conveying their character, creating a story around the shot, or capturing them at their best.
As ever with photography, there’s no substitute for experience. If we can enter a shoot with a go-to lighting setup, tried-and-tested camera settings and portraiture skills down pat, when we’ll have more breathing space to build on that all-important connection with our subjects.
James Paterson
Regular N-Photo contributor James can turn his hand to shooting anything and everything but specializes in portraiture, and is a photoediting whizz! More info at: www.patersonphotos.com
Natural light portraits
Learn how to shoot with nothing but daylight for flattering, natural-looking portraits, using the different qualities of light, from dawn to dusk, to make your subjects shine
1 FIND THE LIGHT
Good light is the key ingredient to all photography, but none more so than portraiture. The quality of the light – its softness, its colour and its strength – can have a huge impact on the look of your portraits. When you are shooting in natural light you’re likely to find pockets of light in any location that are ideal for portraiture. There are no hard and fast rules, but areas of open shade can give you soft, diffuse light that is flattering for faces, while, by contrast, direct sunlight can result in unflattering and unwanted shadows across the face (and it also makes people squint). To quickly judge the light in any place, hold up your hand and study how the light falls
