Portrait photography: my best tips

Even though I am not a specialist in this field, portrait photography is extremely common, often misunderstood, and sometimes confused with other genres. For example, how often do you hear someone describe a photo as street photography when it is actually a portrait of someone walking down the street? As soon as the person becomes the clear subject of the image, we can talk about a portrait. Of course, if you photograph a street scene and people simply happen to be in the frame, but they are not the main subject, then it remains a street photograph. But framing one person tightly in that same street, so that they become the subject of the image, is something different. For anyone new to photography, I would first recommend reading our article on exposure in photography. It covers the essential concepts you need to understand this article, including aperture, ISO, and shutter speed.

Portrait photography is not limited to framing a person’s face, nor does it necessarily mean photographing someone within a wider environment. There are several types of composition that can all be considered portraits. For me, an image becomes a portrait when it is clear that the subject is a person, no matter how you compose the frame. You will find as many opinions on what a portrait should be as there are portrait photographers. Some will tell you to frame tightly with a very shallow depth of field, so that only the eyes are sharp and everything else melts away. Others will tell you to include the subject in their environment and keep the whole scene sharp. In reality, many portrait photographers fall somewhere between the two. Personally, I would say you should do what feels right for the scene. If you feel that the subject needs to be isolated as much as possible so that they stand out, do it. In other situations, showing the surrounding environment can be much more interesting. In short, choose the approach that best captures and highlights your subject.

To shoot portraits, you will still need some camera equipment. But don’t worry: this is a field that does not necessarily require a huge financial investment to get good results. At least, not a huge investment in gear. If you want portraits that really stand out, you will need to invest more in technique and preparation. Simply arriving in front of someone, raising your camera, and pressing the shutter button will rarely be enough to create a strong portrait… even if the result will technically still be a portrait.

On our blog, you will find an article to help you choose your equipment for portrait photography. To keep things simple, almost any camera can be used for portraits, from smartphones to medium format cameras. Of course, some will be more limited than others, especially depending on the lenses you have, or the lens built into the camera. Smartphones and some expert compact cameras, for example, often use a fixed focal length that is not always ideal for every type of portrait. DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, on the other hand, have large enough sensors to handle most situations while delivering high-quality images. Autofocus (AF) is not necessarily a major issue either, as most modern cameras have AF systems that are more than capable for portrait work. Larger sensors still have an advantage, especially when it comes to ISO performance. For low-light portraits, you will often need to raise the ISO to keep the shutter speed fast enough. On our blog, you will also find an article to help you choose between mirrorless and DSLR, as well as a guide to the advantages/disadvantages of the different sensor sizes.

There are many lenses suited to portrait photography. The best choice will mainly depend on the shooting conditions, your budget, and what you want to create.

The next thing to consider is the lens. As explained in our article on portrait lenses, lenses between 35 and 200mm are usually the most commonly recommended. Focal lengths below 35mm are better suited to environmental portraits, where the surroundings play an important role, or to tight portraits with strong perspective effects. Those effects can be interesting, but they are rarely flattering and can quickly become tiring. Longer focal lengths, on the other hand, such as telephoto lenses or long zooms, generally require much more distance from your subject. You will not always have that distance available, and it can also make interaction with your subject more difficult. Still, even though people often recommend longer focal lengths for tighter framing and shorter ones to include more context, it can also be very interesting to frame tightly at 35mm or shoot a wider portrait at 200mm. In the first case, you need to watch for perspective distortion. In the second, you will need to step back, which forces you to compose your image even more carefully.

Finally, some accessories can be very useful, especially for controlling and shaping light: flashes, other types of lighting, diffusers, and reflectors. You can find them at all price points, but they require some practice and add bulk to your kit. It is obviously difficult to use studio lights for a portrait in the woods, or to place reflectors in front of someone you are photographing quickly in the street. Most of these accessories are therefore better suited to prepared shoots, for example studio portrait sessions. The most useful ally, as often, is the flash. When used well, it gives you real control over the light, even if it remains limited by its range.

For metering mode, many photographers recommend leaving the camera in matrix or evaluative metering. In other words, the camera analyzes the entire scene to calculate an “average” exposure. Personally, I don’t fully agree with that advice for portraits. Unless you are shooting a very tight portrait, large areas of the image can easily influence the exposure. This is especially noticeable in backlit portraits, for example at sunset, or when the sky is in the background while your subject is in the shade. The bright background can fool the meter and produce an image that looks “underexposed”. In reality, the camera has simply done what you asked it to do: it has taken the large bright area into account when calculating the exposure. If the person in the frame is your main subject, I would recommend choosing the metering mode according to the space they occupy in the image. If they take up a large part of the center of the frame, center-weighted metering can work well. If they are a much smaller part of the frame, or if there are very bright or very dark areas around them, spot metering will often be more appropriate. Just be careful: on some cameras, spot metering is linked only to the central AF point, as is the case on some Canon bodies. You will find a more detailed explanation in our article on the different metering modes.

The camera mode will depend on what you want to control. If your priority is depth of field, you should use aperture priority mode (A/Av), which is usually the most recommended mode for portraits. If you want to prioritize shutter speed, either to freeze a moving subject or, on the contrary, to create a sense of movement with a longer exposure time, then shutter priority mode (S/Tv) will be more suitable. Personally, I like to control both settings and prefer using manual mode, often with Auto ISO, so that the camera manages the only parameter that is not really “artistic”.

The AF mode will depend on your subject. For a still portrait where you can direct the person, AF-S/One-Shot mode will usually be the easiest option. For an action portrait, AF-C/AI Servo will be better suited. In any case, I recommend setting your camera so you can choose the active AF point yourself. If you leave everything on automatic, distracting elements can fool the camera. That said, many modern cameras, especially recent mirrorless models, now offer face detection or even eye-detection AF, and these systems are becoming increasingly effective. Use them if your camera has them. With manual focus, whether by choice or because your lens does not have autofocus, the question is different: you will need to find the best way to focus accurately, using the focus indicator in a DSLR viewfinder, or the magnification and/or focus peaking available in an electronic viewfinder.

The aperture, written as f/x, lets you control the depth of field, meaning the area that appears sharp in front of and behind the point where you focus. It also reduces or increases the amount of light sent through the lens to the sensor. The smaller the number, for example f/2, the more light reaches the sensor, and the shallower the depth of field becomes. With a larger number, such as f/8, the opposite happens. Ideally, aperture should be chosen according to the depth of field you want. When you use it only to compensate for poor light, it is no longer an artistic choice, but more of a workaround. If you want to create a very shallow depth of field or shoot in very low light, you will need lenses with a large maximum aperture, such as f/1.8 or f/1.4, which usually means prime lenses. Just make sure you will really benefit from them before investing in very large-aperture lenses, as they are generally more expensive, heavier, and bulkier. To start out, I would suggest prime lenses opening at f/1.8-f/2, and zooms opening at f/4, or possibly f/2.8 if the price is reasonable.

The shutter speed, written in seconds or fractions of a second, allows you to freeze the subject when it is fast enough, or to create motion effects when it is relatively slow. It all depends on how quickly the subject is moving and, again, on your intention. The faster the subject moves, the faster your shutter speed needs to be if you want to freeze the action. For a still portrait, some people recommend using at least 1/90s. In reality, it depends on other factors, such as the focal length used and the size and pixel count of your sensor. The longer the focal length, the higher the pixel count, and the smaller the sensor, the more likely it is that movement, either yours or your subject’s, will cause blur. The rule of thumb is to use a shutter speed at least equal to 1 divided by the focal length to avoid camera shake. For example, with a 50mm lens, you should use at least 1/50s. But because of focal length equivalence, if you use that 50mm on a Micro 4/3 sensor, it behaves like a 100mm lens, so you would be better off using at least 1/100s. This rule becomes more flexible if your sensor, your lens, or both are stabilized. For a moving subject, the issue is slightly different because you will often already be using fast shutter speeds to avoid motion blur. For example, when photographing a running child, you will often be around 1/250s or faster, so you probably won’t have a problem with focal lengths below 200mm. With high-resolution sensors, blur can also become more visible. If you want to create motion effects, you will need slower shutter speeds, and stabilization can be very useful, unless you follow the subject’s movement as it moves. I would therefore recommend choosing your shutter speed based on your subject’s movement first. Then, if the subject is relatively still, make sure you do not let the shutter speed drop too low, otherwise you risk introducing motion blur.

ISO sensitivity amplifies the signal to make the sensor more sensitive to light, which allows you to correctly expose a photo even when there is not enough light. That would be ideal if increasing ISO did not reduce image quality. The higher you raise the ISO, the more the image contains what we call “noise”, those colored grain-like artifacts spread across the image, along with a loss of dynamic range and color quality. The goal is therefore to find, depending on your camera and your own standards, the maximum value you are willing to accept. The larger your sensor, the less image quality will usually degrade as ISO rises. Ideally, you should stay at the lowest possible value, but in many situations, increasing ISO will be necessary. If you want rough reference values, I would suggest staying below ISO 1600 on Micro 4/3, ISO 3200 on APS-C, and ISO 6400 on full frame with most cameras. Some cameras handle noise better than others, and some software can do an excellent job too, so adapt these limits to the tools you use.

Whether you use autofocus or manual focus, where you focus is very important. In most cases, photographers recommend focusing on the eyes, to the point that camera manufacturers now offer automatic systems that detect the subject’s eyes. That makes sense: when we look at a portrait, the eyes are usually the first area we instinctively search for. If the subject is not facing you directly and your depth of field is so shallow that only one eye can be sharp, focus on the eye closest to you.

That said, focusing somewhere other than the eyes is not forbidden if you deliberately want to highlight another part of the subject. In that case, it may sometimes be more appropriate to frame only that area, even if the eyes no longer appear in the image. At that point, however, we are almost moving toward close-up photography, or even macro photography.

Focusing goes hand in hand with depth of field. The larger the aperture, the shallower the depth of field, which can be useful to isolate a face or a person, especially when the rest of the image is not particularly interesting or does not help emphasize the subject. But aperture is not the only factor that affects depth of field. The distance between you and the subject, as well as the focal length used, also play an important role. Remember that the closer you are to your subject, or the longer your focal length, the shallower your depth of field becomes, even at the same aperture. Again, there is no rule saying you must reduce depth of field to the thickness of a cigarette paper. Sometimes it is more interesting to increase it so that the context around your subject is included.

Be careful, though: if you change your distance, you also change the perspective, and that should not work against your subject. This also gives you a way to reduce depth of field, even with a smaller-sensor camera. Smaller sensors produce a tighter frame for the same focal length, so to get the same framing you need either to step back or use a shorter focal length, both of which increase the area in focus. Since you can step back and use a longer focal length, you do not necessarily need to buy a more expensive camera, especially as moving away from your subject usually has less negative impact on perspective than moving closer.

However, when using a large-sensor camera and a large aperture, make sure you still have enough depth of field if you are photographing several people and want them all to be sharp. I often run into this problem when taking family photos and my 5-year-old son starts clowning around and ends up slightly behind or in front of the others. The easiest solution is to close the aperture, but if your subjects are far away, you may need to step back and/or use a shorter focal length. Another solution is to ask them to stand roughly on the same line. That way, you do not need to increase depth of field as much, because they are all positioned within it.

There are several classic portrait framings:

• the full-length portrait, where the whole person is included in the frame,
• the American shot, which cuts off the feet and lower legs,
• the waist shot, which cuts around the waist (easy to remember, isn’t it?),
• the bust shot, which cuts around the lower or upper chest,
• the close-up, which isolates the face and may or may not include the shoulders.

When you are getting started with portrait photography, the close-up is often the most practical option because it isolates the subject as much as possible. It also prevents you from being distracted by the background or by an awkward pose, such as a hand on a zipper or a foot pointing in the wrong direction, since those details will not appear in the photo. A full-length portrait is more demanding because you need to pay attention to both the subject’s pose and the place where you position them, since the context is part of the image. How many times have we taken a full-length portrait only to notice later a branch, an ugly tag, or an old clothes dryer in the corner of the frame? Or, once again, a hand on a zipper, except this time it is visible. Intermediate framings are demanding too, because you need to pay attention to the subject and part of their pose, but also to the surrounding context, even if it is more limited. Obviously, the tighter you frame, the more attention you will pay to the face, especially the eyes.

Speaking of gaze, leave some space in front of it, in the direction the subject is looking, to give them room to “breathe” in the frame. This is a basic but very useful tip. If you photograph someone looking left or right, you will quickly see that if the frame ends right in front of their eyes, the result usually feels uncomfortable. In general, whether it is the eyes or the body “moving” in one direction, leave space on that side of the image. If the subject is facing you, this is obviously less of an issue, and centering the face will often make sense. Asking the subject to look straight at you can also be more effective in tight shots. Since the context is less present, making them look elsewhere will often be less relevant. On the other hand, having them turn their body in another direction can make the portrait more dynamic, especially with a three-quarter pose, as it can help emphasize shapes.

The image ratio can also help emphasize the subject, as it often does in photography. The square format has long been associated with portraits, especially for tight, front-facing images. For slightly wider portraits, 3:2 and 4:3 ratios are often interesting because standing subjects are usually taller than they are wide, while the opposite can be true if they are lying down. When your subject is standing, get into the habit of turning your camera to portrait orientation. There is a reason it is called portrait mode, even if no one is forcing you to use it. It will often feel like the most natural way to frame a person. For portraits that include more context, these ratios can still work well, and even 16:9 can be suitable. Again, this is logical, but not a rule. If you want to shoot wide portraits in square format and tight portraits in 16:9, no one is going to stop you. And when the context is important, portrait orientation will not always be the most consistent choice.

One of the most important things in photography is light. After all, photography literally means writing with light, and portrait photography is no exception. As is often the case, it is usually recommended to avoid harsh light, especially in the middle of the day. However, there are always ways to control that light, whether by placing your subject in the shade, adding light with a flash, diffusing it, or reflecting it with surfaces available on location or with accessories you bring. If you want to photograph your subject in natural light without creating strong contrast on their face, choose the hours when the sun is low, just after sunrise or shortly before sunset.

However, this does not mean you should never shoot a subject in direct sunlight if you do not have accessories. The advantage, so to speak, of hard light is that it creates strong areas of contrast that you can use to highlight certain parts of your subject. For example, some photographers use backlighting to create a halo effect around the hair. Others place part of the subject in very bright light and the rest in deep shadow, then expose for one or the other so that the chosen area is correctly exposed while the rest becomes very dark, almost black, or on the contrary very bright, even blown out.

Some light-based techniques are closely associated with portrait photography, such as high-key and low-key. High-key consists of overexposing the image almost to the point of clipping, while keeping shadows to a minimum and using mostly light tones to create a soft, romantic, immaculate look. Low-key is more or less the opposite: you underexpose so that the image contains many dark tones, highlighting only a few details to add character. To make these techniques easier, you can prepare your subjects accordingly, for example by asking them to wear light clothing for high-key and dark clothing for low-key. These techniques are easier in a controlled environment, such as a studio with artificial lights, but they can also be done with natural light. For high-key, soft light, such as low-angle sun or open shade, will be preferable. For low-key, you will need to find a place where the light falls only on one or a few specific areas.

If you do not have a studio (as everyone does, of course!), the accessories mentioned above can also help you achieve these effects, and much more. The flash has many advantages in portrait photography. It allows you to add and control light, and its burst is usually powerful enough to illuminate your subject, since they will rarely be several dozen meters away. It can also be combined with other flashes to light several specific areas or extend its range, among other things. However, it requires practice to use properly. Reflectors, such as this one, can be used to bounce light back into shadow areas. You simply point the reflector toward the area that lacks light. They often have silver and gold sides to change the tone, and sometimes even a black side to add shadow. Diffusers, as the name suggests, soften the light: you simply place them between the light source and the subject. Flashes are often supplied with a small diffuser that attaches directly to the head (the flash head, not yours).

Once you have prepared your camera and your scene, it is time to focus on your subject. The phrase you will hear most often when photographing someone is: “I’m not photogenic.” Some people may be more comfortable in front of the camera than others, but in most cases, if a portrait fails, it is because the photographer did not do their job properly.

If you are photographing subjects from far away, it will be difficult to communicate with them or direct them. In that case, you will need to be patient, stay alert, and anticipate as much as possible so you can capture the right moment and the right pose. But if you are photographing someone close enough to interact with, don’t hesitate to talk to them, explain what you want, and ask what they expect from the shoot as well. Once you start shooting, your attention will be divided between your camera and your composition, so it is better to talk to them beforehand. People often feel uncomfortable and unmotivated in front of the camera because they are convinced they are not photogenic. Think of all the times you had to do something while thinking it was bound to fail; it hardly helps you relax, does it? Your first goal is therefore to help your subject relax and enjoy the moment. Not only will the experience be more pleasant for them, but you will also be more likely to capture natural, interesting expressions. Once you have gained their trust, don’t wait too long before shooting (use burst mode if needed), because the longer they stare at the camera, the more tense they become and the less sincere their expressions will be. A good trick is to ask the subject to look at the lens only at the last moment. Since you are the one pressing the shutter, it is up to you to make them understand when the right moment has arrived. Also be precise with your instructions. Don’t simply ask them to look to one side or the other; ask them to look at a specific point.

As for poses, choose what interests you most. You can guide the person entirely into a pose you have in mind, let them pose naturally, or mix both approaches. In reality, when I say it is up to you, it is also up to the person being photographed. Some people feel more comfortable when they receive clear instructions, while others can be very imaginative, sometimes even more than you, when given freedom.

If you are making a “classic” portrait focused on the eyes, you will probably want to highlight them. There are simple ways to do this without relying on heavy makeup. For example, ask the person to lower their chin slightly. This makes the face appear slimmer and naturally brings more attention to the eyes. Try it in front of a mirror: stand straight and then lower your chin. The more you lower it, the more your eyes stand out. Of course, if you lower it too much, it can become a little scary, so the movement should remain subtle. Shooting from above, by placing yourself higher than your model, creates a similar effect: the eyes are emphasized, but be careful with perspective, as it can flatten the face, something we often see in children’s portraits. For a slightly wider portrait, a low angle can make the model appear taller, but again, be careful not to exaggerate unless that is a deliberate, controlled effect. For the body, try to play with curves. Your model needs to look alive, because unlike real life, the moment will be frozen in the photograph, and you need to find ways to bring dynamism into the pose. Pay particular attention to arms and legs. Arms hanging straight along the body, legs stiff as boards, or a rigid neck rarely look good in photos. Also pay attention to the extremities, especially feet and hands, as they are often accidentally cut off in wider shots. One way to avoid this is to add props to the composition, for example by asking the person to hold an object. If they are holding something, that object has visual importance, which will remind you to include it, and by extension, the hand holding it. Obviously, that is harder to do with a foot! If you are afraid of cutting off hands or feet accidentally, make a deliberate crop. A clear, intentional crop usually looks better than feet or fingers half cut off by mistake.

There you go. I hope these photography tips will help you get started with portrait photography. Once you have applied them, don’t forget that you can eventually stop following them. These rules make it easier to succeed when you are starting out, but once you gain experience, it can be very interesting to do the opposite and try ideas that do not seem logical at first, as long as they are handled with control and boldness. To go further, I invite you to read our article on how to shoot with a long focal length. You’ll find other types of advice there.

See you soon.

Written by Sylvain PONS

I've been passionate about photography since 2010, learning as I went along. Today, I dedicate myself to guiding others in their choice of camera gear and sharing a variety of tips to improve their photography skills.

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