A Comprehensive Guide to Capturing Better Portraits

Capturing technically sound and compelling portraits take the confluence of a variety of skills. If you would like to improve your portraits, check out this fantastic video tutorial that is brimming with a wide variety of helpful tips and techniques. 

Coming to you from Mark Galer's Alpha Creative Skills, this excellent video tutorial will show lots of tips and techniques for taking better portraits. Portraiture is always a challenging genre because it takes great lighting skills, strong editing technique, an eye for composition, and the ability to work with people on top of all of that. Posing is something that a lot of people struggle with a bit, particularly as they are trying to manage things like camera settings and lighting. One thing that helped me when I was first starting was taking time to study the posing of top pros and memorize a few to keep in my back pocket. This took the pressure off trying to constantly improvise poses in the moment and made it easier to work knowing I had a safety net to fall back on if I was feeling a bit stuck without making the client awkwardly stand there while I figured things out. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Galer. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

Log in or register to post comments
2 Comments

There are some good snippets of advice and some nice images, but why dedicate so much effort to talk about learning to work with light when you use an inset video of yourself with dark hair, a dark shirt, and a lighting style that makes you look like a floating, talking head?

Nice pictures. Read https://soundsworld.nethouse.ru/posts/soundworld
to know use of different microphone for vlogging
according to your purpose.