1. Purpose
2. Equipment
3. Clothing
4. Location & Background
5. Lighting Strategies
6. Posing
7. Cropping
8. Filters & Vignetting
- Establish your purpose - This is your guiding light to successful portraiture. Ask yourself: Why am I photographing this person outdoors? Is it because they feel more natural and comfortable outdoors, do they have outdoor hobbies like gardening, biking, rock climbing, etc.? Am I trying to make a wall portrait or a small gift print, or both?
My goal is to capture an emotion or sustain a memory of my subject rather than to create a simple roadmap to their face. To do this I need to select an appropriate location and decide if there is any other propping that can be done to create a clearer picture.
Based upon the answers to these questions I select the location, props, and equipment for the photo session.
- Gather your camera equipment - For outdoor portraiture I take my camera, lenses, tripod, on-camera flash, reflector, and vignette lens shade. My lens choice is going to be based on whether or not I am photographing a group, individual, close-up, or environmental portrait. For most portraiture I use a combination of a slight telephoto and a normal lens. I rarely use a wide-angle lens for fear of too much foreshortening effect on my subject.
- Clothing - Find out what the subject's self image is like. Do they see themselves as a rugged outdoor type, or a sun-tanned goddess, or as colorful as a spring bloom. The typical rugged outdoor type is going to be more comfortable in a denim long sleeve shirt than a golf shirt. The person that is interested in tanning is going to be more comfortable in shorts and a tank top than pants and a long sleeve shirt, etc. Knowing this I try to make suggestions that will augment the final portrait. My goal is to capture expression in the face and eyes. Patterns and colors that distract from this will diminish the desired effect.
The person wearing the long sleeve flannel or chamois shirt should go for a solid shirt that is cooler in color so the warmth of their face will project. Remember warm tones project and cool tones recede. The person that wants to highlight their tan can wear whites and pastels, or they can also look good wearing black. If the person loves wearing floral patterns I'll ask them to wear a skirt with floral patterns but to stick with a solid around the neckline so that there is adequate separation from the face to the pattern.
Clothing also affects whether or not I do close-up, 3/4-length or full length poses. If a person is sleeveless I avoid head and shoulders poses because the skin on the shoulder competes with the face. I prefer 3/4 or full length poses. If they are wearing shorts I avoid 3/4 length and go with either waist up poses or full length poses to avoid making the thighs look large by cropping into them.
- Select your backdrop. While dusk and dawn offer the optimum lighting condition where you can put a subject in virtually any location and get wonderful lighting contrast and color, the vast majority of photographs are made later or earlier in the day. I try to work while the sun is less than 45 degrees above the horizon or, in simple terms, morning between 8-10 am and late afternoon after 3 pm. During these hours I can position the sunlight on my subject's face just as effectively as I can in the studio. I can turn a person's head towards the sunlight for short lighting or I can turn it away from the sun for broad lighting.
When selecting a location for photographing a person I try to make sure that what is visible in the background shares the same kind of light as my subject. This ensures that there isn't too much contrast in my scene. For example, if I have a person placed in a spot with bright sunlight and my background is in shade I cannot maintain textural detail in the background while properly exposing for the person's face. In this situation I will have essentially a black background. More often I place a person in shade and have to work to avoid having a background that is sunlit. If the background is too bright it will provide too much distracting contrast away from my subject. Keeping the subject and the background in the same "key" will insure a more pleasing contrast range of tones in the image and will prevent distraction from our primary purpose. My personal preference for a background is for it to be of cooler tones like shaded green foliage rather than color floral backdrops. I want the warmth of my subject's skin tone to project forward from a cooler, darker background of green grass, leaves or cold gray rock.
Aside from lighting contrasts I look for a location that will afford me great amounts of depth and texture. I avoid having a person pose directly in front of a bush or rock if possible. I rather have room for the person and I also look for ways to incorporate a slice of foreground. It isn't always possible but I try to create a scene that has a foreground, subject in the middle ground, and a receding background. This scenario creates an image that translates a more accurate sense of spatial depth in a two dimensional photograph.
- Lighting. Having one primary light source is what I call "natural" lighting. We only have one sun, therefore it looks unnatural to have two sets of catch lights or two shadows. When I am photographing outdoors the sun is usually my main light source (unless I am in a back-lighting situation). All other lighting is fill-in light to decrease contrast by illuminating the shadows. Although a reflector can do a nice job, I rely primarily on an on-camera flash for outdoor fill. Too often a reflector has to be so close to the person I'm photographing to have noticeable affect that I have a difficult time hiding it from the camera. Flash gives me much more freedom and is very easy to configure for optimum results. However I do employ a reflector when there is an extra person along such as a doting mother because it gives them something to do and I can have them hold the reflector in front of their face so they don't second guess my decisions.
If I am working in bright sunlight I will usually configure a 3:1 light ratio or 4:1 ratio. To do this I set up my flash to underexpose by one or 1-1/2 stops. If I am working in soft shade light that already looks good on the subject's face I will use a 4:1 or 5:1 ratio by setting my flash to underexpose by 1-1/2 or 2 stops under exposure. If you are using a TTL flash you will need to research how to program in these settings. If you are using a typical Automatic flash the easiest way to configure it to underexpose is to overstate the ISO setting. If I am using 100 speed film I can set the ISO on the flash to 200 or 250 in order to fool the sensor into thinking I need less light for my exposure which will cause it to cut off flash output by the desired amount.
One thing to keep in mind is while working under shade lighting is that shade lighting is still directional in nature based upon the original source of sunlight. Also while cloudy and overcast days look like non-directional light, they are not. I always take the palm of my hand and rotate it about to see which direction provides the lowest contrast in the shadows of my hand. This is the direction I am going to have my subject face.
- Posing: There are two rules of thumb I use in posing a person. The first rule is to have the person interact with their surroundings and the second rule is to observe a person's natural posture and to augment it for photographic composition. I don't believe in the "Twister" approach to posing where you run every person through the same basic poses. I try to spend time chatting with a person while I am setting up or loading film and observe their natural state. The way I combine these two rules is to ask the person to interact with the surroundings by inviting them to "have a seat on that rock" or "how about sitting on the ground over there". I almost never have the subject stand in isolation from the surroundings. They are either sitting on the ground, leaning against a tree, park bench, etc. Once they have assumed a comfortable position for themselves I will look for ways to augment the position for a more artistic portrait.
The two things I am most conscientious about are the position of the hand and the angle of the head. I will avoid letting hands compete for the attention with the face and I try to add dynamic angles to the position of the head so it stands out from the torso.
Although posing can seem subjective, there are a few guidelines to follow.
Joints should be fluid and not locked to avoid a stiff "static" look. Avoid full on views of joints and hands to avoid having any single area of exposed skin larger than the subject's face. This keeps the viewer from being drawn away from the subject's face due to sharing the same visual weight. You need to make the subject's face the center of interest in most cases. The body language should convey the subject's mood or disposition. Watch for non-verbal gender cues when posing.
Avoid having parts of the body level to each other such as shoulders and hands. This creates a static presentation. By keeping focus points at different levels such as having shoulders at an angle gives the view a sense of motion and pattern that keeps their eyes drawn into your portrait. Generally eyes should be placed 2/3 of the way up from the bottom of the image because they are a strong focal point and need to have the bottom 2/3rds of the space to help balance the visual weight. When posing groups, watch for leading lines and try to keep heads at varying heights to create a sense of geometric shape and pattern over the entire image.
Expressions should appear sincere, whether they're serious or joyful. Try to avoid eyes being partially open as this creates visual tension. In most cases either you want your subject to appear remote or oblivious to you in an environmental setting, or you want their expression to show an interaction with the viewer. In either case try to avoid making the person appear too staged or plastic. That's where the sincerity of the expression comes in.
In virtually every portrait session I will do a variety of formal and informal images. If it is a family group I will do formal poses where each person is looking towards the camera with similar intensity of expression and then I will do portraits that show the family interacting. Quite often this will yield a true family dynamic. I also really enjoy hanging portraits on the wall so I like to do what I call landscape portraiture or lifestyle portraiture. In a landscape portrait emphasis is placed on the environment and the people just happen to be in the image. Rather than blowing a person's face up to 20x30 I am making a 20x30 scenic image that contains my subject as an element of the portrait. In this way I am creating a fine balance between my subject and the environment. The easiest way to accomplish this is to use the rule of thirds for placing your people in the scene.
- Cropping - This where you decide what to include in your portrait and what to exclude. Aside from avoiding mergers or near mergers where a person looks like there is a tree branch growing out of their head, avoid cropping people at the joint. This will create a visual "amputation" of extremities. Think of cropping as being like performing first aid where you need to put tourniquets between the joints to keep circulation from being cut off completely.
One common problem with cropping is where a person is leaning on their elbow and the upper arm is not connected with the forearm. Try to keep one continuous line along the entire arm if at all possible. For head and shoulders poses I avoid cropping out part of the neck line because it tends to make a person look like they aren't wearing any clothes underneath and is typically too provocative. I crop head shots above the bust line, waist high shots just below the belt and three quarter length poses between the knee and ankle.
Avoid cropping outdoor portraits too tightly because it will defeat the whole purpose of being outdoors.
- Filters & Vignetting - One last consideration for my portraiture is the use of a vignetter and some sort of diffusion. I typically want to soften the edges of a portrait to get a more painterly effect or to render blotchy skin more smooth.
I also am thrifty and so I use a little bit of vignetting to artificially darken the corners of my image which is something I would traditionally do in the darkroom which adds more time and expense. By vignetting my exposure in the camera I am trying to create a custom print appearance on the negative so I can pay machine print prices while achieving craftsman-like results.
When it comes to using diffusion filters there are two basic choices. I can use a glass filter that has an etching pattern to blend highlights into shadows or I can make a diffuser out of black netting material that causes shadows to blend into highlights. The etched glass filters are easier to use and generally require no exposure compensation but they do have one major potential problem. If a person is wearing white clothing, you will see a halo effect that is undesirable in most cases.
The black netting material can be added without creating a halo effect and you can vary the diffusion by adding or subtracting layers of netting. However you need to add some exposure compensation for the loss of light.