Five Helpful Tips for Better Portrait Photography

Portrait photography takes both technical competence and the ability to work with people, making it a challenging but rewarding genre. This great video will give you five helpful tips to improve your portraits.

Coming to you from Miguel Quiles, this helpful video discusses five tips to improve your portrait photography. Of the tips, I think filling the frame is one of the most subtle but important to consider. A lot of newer portrait photographers tend to leave a lot of space in the frame around the subject and be a bit conservative when they're cropping. While this is perfectly fine and even desirable for something like environmental portraits where you want to place the subject in context or show off something relevant to their story. However, when you're shooting a simple portrait or headshot, having that extra room around the subject can make your subject appear smaller and decrease the impact they have on the viewer. By cropping in more closely, you make it extra easy to draw in the focus of your viewer and create a more impactful photo, so don't be afraid to crop a bit more. Check out the video above for the full rundown. 

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.

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5 Comments

Really good advice. Some of which I was aware but had forgotten. Thanks for the reminder/ refresher.

Perhaps you should include a tip about having your subject remove their hat while indoors. It helps with lighting the eyes, reducing the shadows on the face, makes the model look more interesting, and is considered good manners within respectful cultures.

Tip no.6 : posing so that your model doesn't have that dead-behind-the-eye look.

Great video Miguel.

I really admire your tips. Portrait photography can capture the true personality of a person that's why I love portrait photography. Last week I was finishing my photo-shoot in Mumbai. That was a very cool shoot because of Alex F Buchholz Photography. Mr. Alex F Buchholz is truly a talented professional in all aspects of photography. He is very creative, and artistic. Keep posting.