3 Portrait Photography Mistakes and How to Fix Them

Portrait photography is a popular genre that challenges a variety of skills, both with technical skills like your handling your camera and lighting and with more subjective skills like working with subjects. If you would like to improve your portraiture, check out this fantastic video tutorial that discusses three common mistakes and what you can do to fix them or avoid them in the first place. 

Coming to you from Eli Infante, this excellent video tutorial discusses three common portrait photography mistakes and how to fix them. As you will probably notice, all three mistakes come from having too narrow an idea of what constitutes portraiture — essentially buying into the idea of the most well-known version of the genre. But portrait photography is a tremendously varied and nuanced genre, and it is about a lot more than soft light and wide-open apertures. You are doing yourself a disservice if you immediately subscribe to that subset of portraiture instead of exploring and finding your creative voice, so don't be afraid to experiment a bit. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Infante. 

If you would like to continue learning about the art of portraiture, be sure to check out our range of tutorials on the subject in the Fstoppers store.

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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4 Comments

Mistakes:

1. Using soft light only
2. Shooting golden hour only
3. Using bokeh lenses only

Sort of ironic that the teaser photo is shot with soft goldenish hour warm light, with a bokeh filled background....