Portraits and Self Portraits

Alter Your Perspective

Most portraits are taken with the camera at (or around) the eye level of the subject. While this is good common sense – completely changing the angle that you shoot from can give your portrait a real WOW factor.

Get up high and shoot down on your subject or get as close to the ground as you can and shoot up. Either way you’ll be seeing your subject from an angle that is bound to create interest.

Introduce Movement

- Movement creates a sense of interest

Portraits can be so static – but what if you added some movement into them? This can be achieved in a few ways:

• by making your subject move
• by keeping your subject still but having an element in the scene around them move
• by moving your camera (or it’s lens to achieve a zoom burst)

Settings—The Other Subject

The settings in which you make pictures of people are important because they add to the viewer's understanding of your subject. The room in which a person lives or works, their house, the city street they walk, the place in which they seek relaxation—whatever it is, the setting provides information about people and tells us something about their lives. Seek balance between subject and environment. Include enough of the setting to aid your image, but not so much that the subject is lost in it.

Environmental Portrait:

This photo is quite extraordinary to say the least. The lighting really helps the mood. You can see the light of his helmet and its beam in the photo. Did i forget to mention, they are on top of a flipping mountain! The detail, expression and overall quality of this photo is amazing.

Photography Self Portrait:

I really enjoy this photo and the creativity behind it. Its quite a simple photo to recreate but it has a lot of character. Its a photo that definitely catches your eye.

Casual Portrait:

Holy cow this is a very well done photo, The background, foreground and everything in general is so appealing to the eye. The colors really bring out the happiness and awesomeness of this photo.

1. What are the characteristics of an environmental portrait?

Environmental portraits should consist of having a recognizable environment, usually outdoors, and sometimes out of the photographers control of what happens in it.
2. What is the difference between an environmental portrait and a casual portrait?

Casual portraits are more to say something, and to be used for people to recognize a face, a environment portrait more of the time is an art, or is to mark a certain time when something happened.

3. What will you need to do to get a really good self-portrait?

Well its not usually the best idea to take a picture of yourself by yourself alone, so you need a photographer obviously, but besides that a good self portrait should be appealing to the eye and to the person is the "self".
4.  When you go take these pictures, and you will eventually turn in one of each, a portrait and a self-portrait, describe to me what you would like to do and who you would like to take a portrait of and where you might shoot these images.

I really like to incorporate colors and black and white like the picture I showed above. Also the framing I usually use is really close to the face or their whole body, I find the other positions to be a little awkward looking. I also like having a very simple background that either has a repeating pattern or is just a blank wall, or a background that totally makes the subject pop because they don't fit in to the scenario, like a lion in the middle of the ocean.