How to shoot portraits
How to take easy portrait photos using your digital slr.
How to shoot Portrait Photos:
You’d like to use your Canon XSi or 50D to capture beautiful portraits of your children, pets, family, or friends, but your results just haven’t been quite what you expected?
In order to shoot “studio” quality photos, you will need to stop relying on ambient lighting. You now have to advance your photography and control your own light by implementing studio lights! Studio lights can be a flash or a more serious light such as a studio strobe. A strobe is a dedicated light unit, think theatre stage lights etc..
You may ask, what about the flash on your camera? As stated in our EOS speedlite guide, the onboard flash is not acceptable for professional results. You will never achieve what you desire if all you use is the onboard flash.
So what do you need to shoot professional style portraits?
Using a Canon 430ex shooting wirelessly through a white satin umbrella to the left of the camera, I was able to get this nice soft light which wrapped around my subjects without causing any unsightly wrinkles and lines to be exposed. This simple setup required little to no adjustment of the lighting, but did require an understanding of aperture and shutter speed.
430ex shooting through a satin umbrella
430ex, 580ex II and a hot shoe cord
A flash fires incredibly fast, less than 1/500th of a second. That means all of the light your flash will produce should typically have been dispersed prior to your shutter closing. To get professional results, you will need to shoot in manual mode.
Instead of metering for the scene, you will want to just dial in the settings you desire. For my shots, I wanted to have excellent clarity with little bokeh but I also desired to achieve crisp shots of my subjects. To do this, I used a shutter speed of approximately 1/180th and an aperture of 8.0 This combination when combined with my shoot through umbrella provided this shot which I am fond of. The XSi becomes flash synch limited at 1/200 and the 50D at 1/250. However, 1/180th is more than fine for hand holding with most lenses. Just dont forget about the hand held lens rule which is that 1/(focal length x 1.6) is required to hand hold a shot and not obtain camera shake.
an umbrella and flash up high and pointing down at the subject
Moody lighting for a moody subject
So how can you get similar results or take portraits? The general rule for taking portraits is that wide angle lenses will distort or make predominant facial features like a large nose even more predominant. In order to get more attractive portraits, it is recommended to use a telephoto lens typically around 85 – 150 mm in length to frame your subject. The 50 1.8 mm is also a great starting point.
I like to use the 70-200 2.8 if possible, its a great portrait lens especially outdoors.
When you need to shoot indoors or in tight spaces, in order to capture full body shots you will need to use a wide angle lens.
For the shot above, I relied solely on flash lighting. I used a simple shoot through umbrella to light my scene. This concept works by placing a Canon speedlite on a light stand (tripod for lights) and then using an umbrella adapter to mount the flash and umbrella on the stand. I then open the umbrella and flash the light through its white satin surface. We use an umbrella because the act of dispersing the light through the umbrella, changes the light from harsh intense and “hard” light to a very pleasant white and soft light. A soft light doesn’t expose wrinkles and other undesirable effects on our subject. Instead it produces a nice soft light wrap which brings out a nice glow from our subjects. This is perhaps one of the best investments you can make in order to get better portraits. These umbrellas only cost $25 – $50, a nice change from the typical expensive photography equipment.
How to start shooting portraits with speedlites?
When shooting portraits, you do not need to use a tripod or a monopod. The key to getting nice focused portraits using your Canon EOS camera, is to shoot in manual and maintain a high shutter between 1/150 and 1/200th of a second and use whatever aperture is appropriate to your creative tastes. For the shot above I used an aperture of F8.
With a fast shutter speed, you can hand hold your camera, it will minimize the ambient light so that you can really control the scenes lighting characteristics however you choose.
Using only one flash and a silver reflector panel, I was able to get the lighting I wanted for these particular shots.
Wireless EOS speedlites
I have a 430ex Speedlite and a Canon 580ex II speedlite. The Canon 580ex was mounted to my camera, and placed in master mode. I also set the 430ex on the light stand and set it to slave mode. Using the Canon XSi or Canon 50D on screen flash control menu , I was able to manually adjust the power output of the flash to 1/4th power. I also disabled the master flash firing, that way the 580ex would be used to both focus the scene and control the 430ex, but did so without firing its own flash lighting.
Because the flash brightness is so intense, it can light up your scene adequately to bring out your subjects details. Instead of relying on ambient light and longer shutter speeds, we instead have a larger depth of field with nice soft lighting wrapping around our subject.
Things to keep in mind are that, if the light is too bright you can either dial it down using the camera menu flash control, or you can move the light stand further back.
The equipment I used are as follows:
Equipment:
Equipment:
Canon XSi Features, Settings and Configuration
How to Get Professional Photos from your Canon XSI
50D Guide:
50D Portraits
50D Basic Features
50D Landscape Photos
50D ISO Test
Canon XSi Guide
Hyperfocal Distance Explained