How to take better portraits - Nancy Steele Portraiture

Taking better portraits for the holidays and everyday

I thought I’d share some fun easy ideas to help you create better everyday images and especially for the upcoming holidays.

I’m gonna keep it really basic to just a few ideas, so play around see if you get some better images and let me know if you found something else that helps or if the tips worked for you!

After all, I not only wanna best create the best images for my clients, I want you to see a little bit into the ideas of how I see and what creates an image that makes you love it. So let’s do that with your everyday photos.

I hope this information gives you just a little bit of ideas and challenges you to take better images not only every day but during the holidays when you’re with your families and groups and friends go ahead take more snapshots then remember to print them put them on your desk hang them on your walls give you something to make your smile each day!

Have a fantastic weekend everybody and thanks for stopping by and reading the blog feel free to give me some feedback some ideas of what you tried and if this helped make your everyday photos more special for you!

Lighting this is a great place to start think about if there’s bright spots patchy spots isn’t nice even shadows or shades. As a portrait photographer I think about this in aspects of studio lighting off camera flash using reflectors using shading devices and what is gonna be the best outcome for my client.
Posing, now this is something I spend a lot of time and money on education about learning how to pose my subjects in the best possible manner. But I am happy to give you some tips and tricks about posing. You wanna think about stretching your body towards the camera in long gating your arms and body and neck and face just to get rid of a few of those little crinkles that we don’t actually love about ourselves. Remember to laugh and smile have fun with it. For professional portraits I always like to say awkward is good because it’s about the angles but for everyday portraits just think tall and forward.
Composition how do things look altogether? in a photographer’s terms, we think about rule of thirds leading lines and how the composure looks overall to the eye. But when you take a photo just think about is there too much space between people I like to use the charm squish how people get close together makes them laugh and smile is the subject centered those are some really basic composition ideas.
Background how’s the background look is it blotchy with light is it bright is it distracting is it too simple if you turned and looked the other direction would the background be prettier would it be not as good so just keep in mind when you’re taking a simple quick photo what’s that background do isn’t it enhancing your photo or is it distracting your photo.
Focal lengths this is something with your iPhone or your smartphone these days is the photo mode or the portrait mode it’s gonna make the background blurry and the portrait mode which is changing your depth of field. I have technical things that I do to change my depth of field, but our smartphones have made it so much easier to make a nice portrait of someone in our everyday use of your phones, so go ahead play around with it!