Photography Addiction: Cheat sheet

Showing posts with label Cheat sheet. Show all posts

12 Portrait Photography Tips You’ll Never Want to Forget

Portrait photography tips can run the gamut from simple tweaks to your camera settings to the seemingly impossible task of getting children to stay still.

Although many photographers upgrade to a decent DSLR to give them more control when they take family portraits or pictures of friends, getting great shots of people is always a challenge.

The difference between amateur and professional portraits can be vast. So we’ve compiled this list of 14 of the most important portrait photography tips for any photographer to know.

We’ll start off with the basics on aperture, shutter speed and lens choice, then move on to focusing and photo composition techniques, before showing you how to use natural light and reflectors to dramatically improve your results.

We’ll then discuss some of the more advanced portrait photography tips, such as the benefits of using flashguns and other accessories when shooting portraits.

Whether you’re taking portraits of your friends or you’ve been commissioned to photograph a family, and whether you’re shooting in a pristine studio or outside in your local park, the helpful advice below will help you become a better portrait photographer.

Portrait Photography Tips: when to use Exposure Compensation

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40 More Portrait Ideas

Recently we shared with you our free posing guide with 54 different portrait ideas to try at home. It was so popular, we decided to share some more portrait ideas from that shoot!

Our latest photography cheat sheet is another visual posing guide that you can download and use as inspiration for your portrait photography.

Often, though, a simple, new pose you’ve never tried before can give you the burst of inspiration you’ve been needing. A creative pose and a willing subject can get you shooting again.

To this end, in our infographic below we’ve suggested some portrait ideas for having your subject try a range of creative postures, such as posing on the floor.

We’ve also explored how different hair styles can add different moods to your portraits. And there’s much more.

54 Portrait Ideas: free downloadable posing guid

Are you stuck for portrait ideas? Sometimes we’ve found that you can over-think these things. When you put so much thought into backdrops and colour schemes and following others’portrait photography tips, you can overlook some of the fundamentals of portrait photography, such as your subject’s pose. We believe our posing guide below should help!

A great way to reignite you portrait photography with new portrait ideas is to shoot a model in your home photo studio, using as minimalist a set-up as possible. By experimenting with different poses you can see what works and get new portrait ideas to apply to your next shoot.

To help you along we’ve put together our latest photography cheat sheet, a visual posing guide that you can download and use as inspiration.

How to calculate hyperfocal distance: free photography cheat sheet

What is hyperfocal distance? Before the introduction of autofocus cameras, the use of ‘hyperfocal distance’ was a popular focus technique used by photographers – and it’s still one of the really neat camera tricks for times when your camera struggles to autofocus in difficult lighting conditions.

Hyperfocal distance is basically the distance that you can focus to at any given aperture, where the resulting depth of field will retain sharpness in the scene from as far away as infinity to the closest possible point.

The depth of field increases greatly when combining smaller apertures with wider-angle zoom settings, so using the hyperfocal distance technique is particularly useful for landscape photography, especially when you’re using a lens that has a built-in distance scale.

Hyperfocal focusing: how to calculate the best distance to focus at

Knowing how to calculate hyperfocal distance isn’t actually as complex as its technical name implies, but mastering this important photography technique can make all the difference to your photography. Here we answer all of the common questions photographers have about hyperfocal focusing

Hyperfocal focusing? Sounds a bit ‘new age‘…

It’s actually an old-school technique that helps you maximise sharpness in a photo. A camera lens can only focus to a single distance at any one time, but there’s an area that extends from that point, both towards the camera and towards the horizon, where things still look sharp. This area is known as the depth of field.