How To Make Your Portraits More Creative

Portraiture is about much more than simply capturing someone in a pleasing pose with good lighting; it takes a certain amount of creativity to make images that distinguish your work from the crowd. This excellent video tutorial discusses how to make your portraits more creative. 

Coming to you from Eric Floberg, this fantastic video tutorial details how you can make your portraits more creative. One of the quickest and easiest ways to do this is simply to stop down your lens a bit. It is very common, particularly nowadays, when extreme lens designs have become highly popular, to shoot at extremely wide apertures like f/1.4. And there is nothing inherently wrong with that; it can be a great way to deal with a busy background you do not have control of, for example. However, it is an extremely common look and can be a bit one-dimensional in the sense that it is just the subject with very little context. Stopping down your lens to a narrower aperture to increase the depth of field and include more of the surrounding environment is a very straightforward way to begin to make more layered shots. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Floberg.

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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1 Comment

Hi. Portraiture is one of the oldest genres in art history.
Portraits have the capability to portray more than just the likeness of a person.