Portraits of Your Loved Ones
As we wade into the third month of winter and get ready for Valentine’s Day, February is a great time to focus on taking photos of the people you love. When you’re taking portraits of your loved ones, whether it’s your significant other or your family, try using a wider aperture to create a blurred background. This can result in beautiful bokeh when you’re shooting outdoors and sunlight is permeating through the trees or when you’re in an area with brightly colored, artificial lights. It’s vital to have a background that is free from clutter and accentuates your model rather than drawing attention to itself.
Make sure that your subject is properly exposed. Your camera will expose for middle grey, but that will often leave your subject underexposed as the camera wants to capture all the detail in the background, especially if you’re outside.
You can play around with different poses when you’re shooting, depending on what you want. You’ll want your subject feeling comfortable, so if they are nervous or uncomfortable try joking with them, chatting with them, getting them to open up such that you can get that natural look. If your subject puts their arms close to their body, this can be unflattering. Instead, you can try directing them to angle their elbows out and intertwine their fingers together.
It’s also important to remember not to crop at the joints. For instance, don’t crop at the knee; crop between the knee and the ankle.
If you want to retouch your portraits, the healing tools in Photoshop and Lightroom are wonderful, and you can go a long way with the spot healing brush, the cloning brush, and similar tools. However, if you want to take your retouching to the next level, try frequency retouching, a method which allows you to separate the physical details of the photo from the colors, making it easier to smooth out skin without your editing appearing unnatural. There are many great tutorials on this technique on YouTube and you can even download free Photoshop actions which will do much of the work for you.
