Helpful Tips for Portrait Location Scouting, Composition, and Posing

A successful portrait takes the confluence of multiple factors, including lighting, composition, location choice, posing, expression, and more. This excellent video will show you how location scouting, composition, and posing came together to create two portraits and give you some helpful tips for your own work. 

Coming to you from Eli Infante, this great video will give you lots of helpful advice on location scouting, composition, and posing in portraits. One technique I really appreciate from Infante is how he uses relevant props to give the hands something to do. Posing is something that a lot of photographers tend to have difficulty with, and the hands are something particularly tricky to work with. Similarly, subjects will often be unsure what to do with their hands if left to their own devices, so it is always a good idea to be paying attention to them while shooting. Of course, that does not mean you should shoehorn a prop into your subject's hands in every portrait; it should be something that is relevant to the portrait's theme and that works naturally with the posing, but if you can use one, it can be a great tool. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Infante.