Portrait Photography How To

How low can you go? That’s what pro photographer Andrew Boey of Beyond Photography asks in the below tutorial where he advises you to try shooting from low angles, sometimes really low angles, to give your portraits a unique look.

“Today’s video is to illustrate to you how important it is to shoot low when you’re a portrait photographer,” Boey says. As an example, he takes a photo of his model for the tutorial, Jovy, from a high angle and then compares it to a low angle shot.

“Let me just take a shot of where Jovy is sitting now by standing all the way up,” Boey notes. “Take a look at this shot. I just made Jovy look really small. She looks drown out by the background. So, what I want you to do, and I tell this to photographer who start out in portraiture all the time is to really go low. You can see this is a much better shot than the first one that we took.”

But even that initial lower angle shot where he was kneeling to capture the photo is not low enough, according to Boey. For the next image he lies completely flat on the boardwalk to capture another image of Jovy.

“Get use to lying down,” he says. “Compare theses three shots – standing, kneeling and lying down – and I think you’ll agree with me that when we go down to the subject’s level it’s going to look amazing.”

Boey explains that he learned this trick from being a commercial photographer where he made products look “bigger, majestic and taller” by shooting low. “We call it the hero shot,” he explains.

Check out all his tips for capturing low angle portraits in the video below. If you want more portrait advice, watch this tutorial with five essential poses for alluring portrait photos.

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