13 Tips for Improving Outdoor Portraits:
Outdoor Portraits present portrait photographers a variety of challengesand opportunities. Today James Pickett from America the Lost suggests 13 tips to helpyou with your outdoor portrait work.
With my very first digital SLR there was a sigh of relief, everything wasgoing to be so much easier now and I didn’t have to think anymore.
You know the scenario; you pull the camera out, charge the batteries, go fora walk around the house and down the street taking the same pictures you havetaken every time a new camera came into your life. “This is great!” you thinkto yourself, “this is going to make my life so much easier!” I was wrong… Infact, I was dead wrong.
There are three very simple things that improve all photography, includingportraits. To this day, there is no trick I have found that replaces the needfor proper exposure, white balance, andsharp focus. Today’s digital cameras have less exposurelatitude than a roll of Kodak gold film. In-camera metering systems have becomemuch more advanced, but the sensors still lack the seven ƒ-stop exposurelatitude that negative film has.
1) Never select all of the focus points for portraits, pick one.
When you pick the autofocus option that allows the camera to select focuspoints, you are doing your portraits a terrible disservice. This feature of acamera is usually designed to pick whatever is closest to the lens and focusthere. In some cases, like with my 1DS Mark III, the camera will choose acluster of focus points and make a “best guess” based on averaging the distancebetween all of the chosen points. Using one focus point gives you, thephotographer, ultimate control.
2) Always focus on the eyes.
The eyes are the windows to the soul, and should be the focal point of anygood portrait. Not only are the eyes the most important part of a goodportrait, but they are the sharpest element on the face and should be left thatway. When you are shooting with a wide aperture value focused on the eyes, thelens’s bokeh will aid in softening the skin as well.
3) Shoot wide open for shallow depth of field.
There are quite a few reasons to invest in a fast lens capable of wideaperture values; the most common is for shallow depth of field. Now that youcan shoot at ƒ2.8 or ƒ4 you should use it. Most fantastic natural lightportraits are from wide aperture values and it is all because of the wonderfulsmooth background blur we call “bokeh”.
4) Never, ever, shoot a portrait at less than 50mm; try to stay at 70mm orhigher.
The last thing you want to hear from a client is “Why does my head lookswelled?” Any focal length below 70mm can distort your subject, however itdoesn’t become very noticeable until you are below 50 MM. The compressioneffect of a telephoto lens will also increase the blur of bokeh. Most of myportraits are done between 120mm and 200mm.
5) Always shoot in RAW.
A thousand times these words have bellowed from my mouth, and it will surelycome out a million more. Raw is an unmodified compilation of your sensors dataduring the time of exposure. It is your digital negative. When you shoot in JPGformat, everything but what the image processor needs to make a shellrepresentation of the image you intended to capture is stripped away. For everyedit you make to a JPG, you lose more data. With RAW, you can make a vast rangeof edits before creating the JPG. How can this make you portrait better? Thinkabout the last time your white balance was set incorrectly, and you tried forhours to remove the color cast only to destroy the image with every attempt.RAW would have saved you by allowing you to fix the color before opening theimage for retouching.
6) Always bring a gray card or a piece of a gray card for white balance.
You got me, gray cards aren’t free. However, $ 5.95 US for a cardboard Kodakgray card is darn close. To avoid confusion, I am going to explain thisbackwards. When opening Adobe Camera Raw or any other RAW image editingapplication there is always a way to select a custom white balance. Usually itis an eyedropper of some kind that you can use to click on what you think isneutral gray in your image. Imagine a world where your photo shoot involved 4locations and a total of 800 images, and all day the camera was set to AutoWhite Balance. That is 800 different white balance values, a post productionnightmare. If, at each location, you have your subject hold the gray card onthe first shot, you will save hours of work. When you open location one (200images) in your favorite post production application, all you have to do isclick the eye dropper on the gray card, select all and synchronize the rest.Precious hours have been saved. (If you plan on taking your time, it may bewise to do this once every 30 minutes or so to compensate for the changinglight of day.)
7) Shoot in the shade (Avoid direct sunlight)
Direct sunlight is harsh, makes your subject squint, and creates harddirectional shadows and unpredictable white balance conditions. When shootingin the shade, there are no more harsh shadows, only smooth milky shadowscreated by your subject’s natural features. With proper exposure and whitebalance, you can make these shots look amazing.
Shooting carefully on an overcast day.
Natures softbox is a giant blanket of clouds. A good heavy blanket of cloudcover can help you enrich your colors, and make some very smooth and pleasingshadows.
9) If you must use hot, hard, bright light…
Always try to control the direction, use some kind of reflector, and try tomimic a studio light. Putting the sun directly behind your subject isn’t a goodidea, unless you are trying to make a silhouette. When the sun is at my back, Ihave the subject look off camera (away from the sun) and get very nice results.Another great trick is to wait for a cloud to move in front of the sun, thisusually creates a very bright yet contrasted look.
10) Use an existing reflector.
For example, my guess is that about 75% of the delivery trucks on the planetare white. These big white delivery trucks can make amazing fill lightreflectors as long as they weren’t painted with an off white. (A yellow tintcan change the white balance in your shadows.) Picture framing outlets andcraft stores always have medium to large sized pieces of foam core lying aroundthat have been left for scrap. They are usually more than happy to part withthese scraps, and if not, chances are there are pieces by the dumpster.
11) Learn the sunny ƒ16 rule.
Why? So you have a baseline for proper exposure in your mind to work with ifno other tools are present. The sunny ƒ16 rule states that on a sunny day, withyour aperture value set to ƒ16, your shutter speed will be the inverse of thecurrent ISO speed. For example, if your camera is set to ISO 100, and youraperture value is ƒ16, your shutter speed will be 1/100th of a second. On acloudy day (or when in the shade) you simply use ƒ8 instead. If you own eitheran incident light meter, or gray card use either for the most accurate exposureinstead. (Note: the procedure for metering exposure with a gray card is not thesame as a custom white balance.)
12) Bring a sheet and a few spring clamps from home.
Leave the expensive 200 thread count sheets on the bed. You already gotthem? Well go put them back. You know that cheap old sheet you stuck in thecorner of a closet to use as a drop cloth the next time you paint? Go get it.(Another option is to buy the cheapest, lowest thread count, white top sheetyou can find.) A queen size sheet is an amazing, cheap, diffuser. Sort of asever foot soft box for the sun. Wrap an edge of the sheet around a branch orclothes line and clamp for a side light. (Anchor the bottom corners with rocksto keep it from blowing into your image.) Clamp all for corners to anything youcan above your subject for an overhead light.
13) Keep the power-lines and signs out!
We have already discussed keeping your camera focused on the eyes; keep yourmind focused on the image as a whole. Power lines, signs, long single blades ofgrass, single pieces of garbage, sometimes even trees can be seriousdistractions from the overall focus of the image… The person you arephotographing.
Last, and most important, have a great time shooting, enjoy what you’redoing and it will show in your work, and the expression of your subject.
A few Bonus Tips on Shooting on Cloudy Days
Clouds are wonderful. They create a giant blanket of natural sunlightdiffusion to make your images rich and powerful. The clouds can fool your mindin ways you can’t imagine, much like your mind corrects for the natural whitebalance throughout the day.
When you are shooting on an overcast day, custom white balance is especiallyimportant. Every day is completely different for color, and that color dependson two things. First, the time of day, as most people understand white balanceand how it changes throughout the day. Second, you have to account for all ofthe wonderful things that light has to pass through before it hits yoursubject.
Pollution changes the color of the light from minute to minute even if youreyes don’t see it, your camera does. On a cloudy day, pollution particles arebeing carried around in the sky by little tiny prisms; water droplets. Now yoursunlight is passing through nature’s prism and reflecting off of pollutionparticles in infinite directions.
Don’t forget to white balance with that custom, tricked out, six dollarpiece of cardboard, your Kodak gray card.
The ultimate secret to shooting on a cloudy day is a compass. (You eithertipped your head like a confused Chihuahua or just had an epiphany.) I am anexperienced, internationally published photographer, and rarely can I see wherethe sun is coming from on an overcast day. The light isn’t omnipresent; it’sjust diffused, softened and scattered. Sunlight on a cloudy day is stilldirectional, and your subject still has a dark side. Use a compass to find outwhere the sun is, put it at your back and shoot like mad. Never again will youlook at an image after and wonder why the sky is blown out when it was socloudy, or why the clouds look great but your subject is dark.
Check out more work of James Pickett at his site America the Lost
