Portrait Photography How To

Unless you shoot portraits in b&w, the tones you apply to an image can make or break a photo—even with a beautiful subject. That's because the color values you use are a very important component of visual storytelling and help convey a variety of compelling moods and feelings.

Photographer Matt Higgs says he’s a firm believer that the best way to become a better photographer is to “go out and do things that would normally be outside your comfort zone.” With that in mind he challenged himself to hit the streets and shoot 30 portraits of complete strangers in just two hours. As you’ll see in the video below, he learned a few things along the way.

We all work diligently to capture and edit photographs properly, so one of the worst things that could occur is losing our edits. And believe it or not, this could happen not only to the image you’re working on, but also to all photos in your Lightroom catalog.

Creating beautiful lighting for your portrait photography shoots can be a fun experience and much easier than you may think. In the below video from Mango Street, they show you seven easy portrait lighting setups that you can try this week.

Michigan-based photographer Robert Hall came up with this interesting project while attending last week’s WPPI Expo in Las Vegas: He challenged two fellow photographers to an off-camera flash shootout, in which the three of them would devote no more than a minute to taking portraits of total strangers on the street.

When we post time-lapse videos, they typically involve thousands of landscape or nature images, like the spectacular project we shared last spring that used 8TB of photos to capture the beauty of blooming flowers over a period of three years. 

Early this year, photographer Benjamin Von Wong and Chris Macaskill of SmugMug were inspired to create a series of superhero theme portraits with everyday people and including a very dynamic (and potentially dangerous) twist.