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Digital Camera Tips & How-To November 2001 • Vol.7 Issue 11 Page(s) 63-66 in print issue	Add To My Personal Library
Portrait Photography Use The Convenience Of Digital Cameras To Your Advantage

Creating a formal studio portrait with a film camera is a challenging and pressure-filled experience. In many cases, the lighting involves several flashes, making it tough to correctly configure your camera. Plus, you only have one sitting to get everything right, and it might be hours or days before you can process the film and see the results. Then again, creating an informal portrait can be even harder. Outside of the studio, you have little or no control over lighting. Oftentimes, the only way to change the background is to either physically move or zoom in on your subject with your camera lens. And of course, each time you move or zoom, you change the way the lighting is seen by the camera. Talk about pressure.

A digital camera eliminates much of this pressure. As soon as you finish capturing a photo, you can preview the results to make sure everything is just right. If not, you can delete the picture, make any necessary adjustments, and try again. Once you have the settings correct, you are free to concentrate on artistic issues, such as how to pose a subject and what to include in the background. The ability to see your results instantly and make corrections on the spot makes a digital camera a good tool to use when learning portrait photography.

Users tend to print portraits on 8- x 10-inch or 11- x 14-inch photographic paper, so you'll need at least a three-megapixel digital camera to prevent the prints from appearing grainy. This is especially true if you plan to edit the portrait with photo-editing software. The ability to set the aperture or otherwise control the depth of field is also useful, as is the ability to switch from automatic to manual controls for tough lighting situations. In addition, your digital camera must include a flash and optical zooming capabilities.

Viewfinder Problems. With most digital cameras, you'll have two ways to see images as you're snapping photos: through an LCD (liquid-crystal display) and a viewfinder. The LCD shows you exactly what the digital camera will photograph, but the viewfinder may not be as exact.

You'll find three types of viewfinders on digital cameras. Inexpensive digital cameras usually have an optical viewfinder. With an optical viewfinder, what you see is only an approximation of what the camera sees due to parallax error. The more you zoom, the greater the parallax error. Additionally, if you use special camera features, such as BestShots on the Casio QV-3500 EX, these features don't appear in the optical viewfinder.

More expensive digital cameras use electronic viewfinders, which display the same image as the LCD and do not suffer from parallax error. Also, electronic viewfinders can usually take advantage of any special camera features, just like LCDs.

Top-of-the-line professional digital cameras use TTL (through-the-lens) optical viewfinders that work just like viewfinders found on SLR (single-lens reflex) film cameras. By using a system of prisms or mirrors, TTL viewfinders show you the same image your camera lens sees.

After determining what type of viewfinder your camera uses so you know how to frame your subject, hold the camera steady while you slowly and gently push the button to take a picture. This is much easier to do with the camera against your face as you look through the viewfinder. If you must use the LCD, attach the camera to a tripod (a three-legged stand) to keep it steady.

Figure 1. Here, the subject of our photo gets lost in the background. With portraits, we are interested in the person, not the background.

Focus On The Subject. In portraits, we want the image of the person (or persons) to be as sharp as possible, but we also want the background to be soft and perhaps slightly out of focus. That's why formal portraits are typically taken in front of a nondescript background. This arrangement draws attention away from the background and focuses on the person in the portrait.

Creating a small depth of field is easy to do with a film camera; you simply set the aperture to a large size (small f-stop number) or increase the shutter speed until the aperture opens wide enough to create the depth of field you want. If you have a large aperture and focus on the subject, his portion of the image will appear sharp, while the background appears less in focus, because much of it is outside the narrow depth of field.

Figure 2. Zooming in closer shows more of the person, the focal point of our photo.

Unlike film cameras, many digital cameras lack precise controls over lens aperture, which is a necessary component for changing the depth of field. But many digital cameras, such as the Casio QV-3500 EX we used to take the photos for this article, have a setting designed to mimic this effect. With the QV-3500 EX, we pressed the BestShot button to display the camera's menu and select the type of photo we wanted to take. With its Face With Chest option, for example, the LCD displays an outline of a face and chest, and the user simply matches that outline with the subject before taking the picture. The camera renders the part of the image inside the outline as sharper than the image outside the outline. This gives you an easy point-and-click way to achieve depth-of-field control, without having to learn the intricacies of the relationship between shutter speed, aperture, and depth of field.

Eliminate The Distractions In Backgrounds. While taking photos, remember that the camera does not "see" an image the way you do. Think back to your last vacation when you took that snapshot of the Washington Monument, for example. Standing there, you were in awe of its height and its stark appearance against the blue sky, so you stepped back far enough to fit it all in your viewfinder and snapped the photo. But when you developed the photo, the Washington Monument looked tiny, and all you saw in the picture were numerous other tourists.

What happened? Your brain focused on the Washington Monument and ignored the distractions. Your brain also retained the majesty of the Monument as you backed up to fit it into the viewfinder; however, the camera dutifully recorded everything it saw in the image, including the tourists and other distractions.

Learning to "see" what your camera "sees" is the key to taking portraits. Master this and you will take great portraits. Fail, and no amount of technical mastery will help you take anything but serviceable portraits.

An informal portrait consists of four elements: the subject, the background, where you stand relative to these, and lighting. Your job as a photographer is to manipulate these elements for maximum impact.

Your first decision involves the background. Most of the time, you'll be somewhere for another purpose, such as a family outing in the park, which limits your choices. Even so, you have to decide if you are going to use playground equipment, the grassy field, or the trees as your background. Look around. In almost any situation, there are a variety of potential items that offer you a wide range of backgrounds. The trick is to choose wisely.

In portraits, the subjects of interest are people. Photographers call this the focal point. Consider these two portraits: Figure 1 and Figure 2. In Figure 1, the subject is so far away that the background overpowers the picture. Moving closer or using the zoom lens, as we did in Figure 2, results in a portrait that focuses on the subject rather than the background.

Figure 3. In this portrait, the background behind the subject's head is very distracting and draws attention away from our focal point.

Figure 4. Just by moving the subject a few feet and slightly repositioning the camera, the portrait no longer displays any distractions in the background.

The best type of background is one that has some relationship to the subject: a child on the slide, a boy on a baseball diamond, or a girl at the piano. But remember, you are photographing a subject, not the background. Use a background that adds flavor to the portrait, but never let the background overwhelm the subject. If you are posing the subject, then you naturally want him near an eye-catching element of the background. If you are watching the subject in action and waiting to take a candid photograph, then you'll need to wait until the subject moves to an area of interest.

In the next portrait, Figure 3, notice how the driveway and bushes near the subject's head distract your eyes. Slightly moving the camera and the subject, as we did in Figure 4, results in a portrait that does not include these distractions.

Figure 5. As we see here, placing the subject off-center according to the rule of thirds helps draw your attention toward the subject.

Another point to keep in mind for informal portraits with distracting backgrounds is to follow the rule of thirds, which creates photos with the subject slightly off-center. Photos such as this let the background direct the viewer's eyes to the subject of the portrait. For an example, see Figure 5. Your attention shifts almost immediately away from the car and toward the subject.

Studio Portraits. Formal portraits tend to place the subject in the middle of the photo because there is generally no background to distract or direct the viewer. The subjects in these portraits take up a large percentage of the picture area. One way to achieve this is to stand close to the subject, but because this can be intimidating, a much better approach is to stand back and depend on your camera's zoom lens. Using the zoom lens provides an additional bonus: Zooming yields less depth of field than standing close. On the downside, zooming can magnify "camera shake," so be sure to use a tripod.

The idea of setting up a portrait studio to take formal portraits may sound expensive and time- and space-consuming, but that need not be the case. You can purchase everything you need for a small studio for around two hundred dollars. While that is not cheap, it will pay for itself if you manage to avoid a couple of trips to a professional photographer. When not in use, all of the equipment can fold up and fit into one or two large boxes in your garage or attic.

For a studio, one thing you'll need is a roll of paper for the background and a collapsible frame to hold it. Next, you'll need a couple of slave flashes and frames to hold them. These AC-powered flashes will flash automatically when they detect the flash from your camera. The background frame cannot hold slave flashes because you'll want the freedom to move them around to vary the lighting. Slave flashes produce fairly harsh light so they are typically aimed away from the subject and into a white umbrella. And the ability to point the flash away from your subject will help control red-eye in a studio setting. The umbrella bounces the light back toward the subject, while softening and defusing it. You will also need various clamps to hold all of this together.

If you decide not to make this investment, you can achieve reasonable results by photographing your subjects in front of a plain wall, drapes, or a canvas consisting of blotches of paint (browns and oranges for a "warm" background; blues and greens for a "cool" background). By using a shallow depth of field with a painted canvas, the blotches will blur into a pleasing, soft background.

Figure 6 is an example of a typical formal portrait. Here, the background paper serves its purpose by not distracting you and letting your eyes focus on the subject.

Many of the problems you face while taking informal portraits disappear in a studio. With studio portraits, your background is static and simple, and you don't have to worry about camera shake, because a tripod fits right into the studio setting. Lighting also is under your control, as long as you know how to apply it properly.

One element you'll need to work with is getting the correct amount of exposure when using a slave flash, which can be difficult because the camera reads the existing light and only expects to add light from its own flash. So when a camera flash discharges, it triggers a slave flash to also discharge, which then adds more light for which the camera cannot automatically adjust. For this reason, slave flashes are usually positioned to achieve a specific effect rather than to provide overall illumination. For example, a hair light is a slave flash with a narrow beam that's used to lighten hair in formal portraits. Another example involves using a slave flash to lighten background paper and minimize shadows.

Compensating for the additional light from slave flashes is much easier with a digital camera, because you can take a test photograph to see if the extra flashes affect the image. If necessary, you can override the exposure setting of the digital camera (if it lets you do this). If not, you can adjust the slave flashes to reduce the amount of light they add to the portrait. And after any of these adjustments, you can take another test photograph and immediately see the results. In this way, you can continually adjust and check your portraits until the exposure is perfect.

Figure 6. In a formal portrait, the background is very plain and nondistracting so the subject becomes the center of attention.

Formal portraits tend to use one of three types of composition. The most common for adults is head, shoulders, and about one-third of the chest. This emphasizes the face of the subject. The second most common composition for adults is the head and upper torso where the photograph stops at the subject's waist. The least common composition for adults is the full-body portrait, but this type of photo is more common for children and members of wedding parties.

Once you have your equipment set up, you are ready to pose your subjects. Much of the art of taking formal portraits is finding a pose that reflects the subject's personality and results in a pleasing portrait. With children, it often helps to use small props, such as a ball or teddy bear. Even with adults, it is not uncommon to use a prop, such as a musical instrument, to reflect what is important to the subject.

Figure 7. Changing the background color can dramatically alter the mood of your portraits.

Artistic Value Of Photos. Because the best portraits are those that capture the personality of the subject, you need to give yourself time to concentrate on the artistic details of portrait photography rather than spending too much time figuring out its technical aspects.

That's why it's good to practice taking portraits before big events, and using a digital camera makes this training period even more convenient. The ability to take numerous test photos without the expense of film and without waiting hours or days to see the results makes a digital camera the perfect tool for learning how to master the art of portrait photography.

by Ronny Richardson

Terms To Know

Aperture�With a film camera, the aperture is a device inside the lens that controls how much light flows through the lens. The aperture itself is an arrangement of overlapping metal leaves that form holes of adjustable size. The aperture setting is usually written with an f in front of it, such as f/16, so the aperture is sometimes called the f-stop number.

A small opening results from a larger f-stop number (f/16 or f/22) and lets less light reach the shutter, while a large opening results from a smaller f-stop number (f/1.8 or f/2.8) and lets more light reach the shutter. For the narrow depth of field you'll need for portraits with distracting backgrounds, use a small f-stop number to create a large aperture.

With a digital camera, changes to the aperture have the same impact, but the aperture is set differently. If your digital camera lets you set its aperture, you'll need to switch to a manual mode and use the menu to select the desired aperture. The camera will then set the corresponding shutter speed.

Depth Of Field�Imagine that you are taking a photo of someone standing 10 feet away from you. Not everything between you and the subject will be in focus. Depth of field is the amount of space in front of and behind the subject that is in focus.

For portraits, we want a small depth of field so distractions in the background are out of focus. The aperture directly controls the depth of field. The larger the aperture is, the smaller the depth of field is. Changing the aperture causes the camera to change the shutter speed in order to keep the light entering the camera constant. So, changing the shutter speed also can indirectly control the depth of field. A faster shutter speed results in a larger aperture, and therefore, creates a more narrow depth of field.

Parallax Error�When using an optical viewfinder that doesn't use a system of mirrors or prisms to see what the lens sees, the parallax error is the difference between what is shown in the viewfinder and what the lens sees (and therefore, what the camera photographs). The lack of parallax error found in SLR (single-lens reflex) film cameras is the main reason most professionals use them. Digital cameras with an electronic or a TTL (through-the-lens) optical viewfinder do not suffer from parallax error.

Rule Of Thirds�Take any picture and draw a tic-tac-toe board on it. That is, draw two vertical and two horizontal lines that divide the picture into nine equal size rectangles. The rule of thirds says that the most interesting spots in the photograph are the four interior corners where the lines intersect, and one of these points is where you should place your main subject, depending on the photo's overall presentation.

Shutter Speed�Film cameras need a precise amount of light to strike the film. There are two main ways to control that: the shutter and the aperture. When you press the button, a curtain inside the camera moves away from the film and lets light flow through the lens and onto the film. This curtain is the shutter. The longer the shutter is open, the more light flows in. A typical setting would be 250, meaning that the shutter is open for 1/250th of a second. A setting of 500 (1/500) would let in half the light of 250, and a setting of 125 (1/125) would let in twice as much light as 250.

Higher shutter speeds (500 and 1000) are used to stop action; because they keep the shutter open for such a short period of time that the image does not have time to move. Lower shutter speeds (30 and 60) are used in low-light conditions, but it's hard to hold a camera steady enough for shutter speeds below 60.

As with the aperture, a digital camera typically has a special mode that lets you control the shutter speed by using a special menu. After setting the shutter speed, the camera will then set the corresponding aperture.

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