The goal of portrait should be to capture someone's personality and mannerisms, if it's a full or partial body shot and not a close up you would use the rule of thirds the same way you would any way.
I'm going to go and draw up some guides that might help you apply the rule of thirds to portraits. Might take me a day or two, but I'll try. The important thing is not to use it when you think it looks dodgy.
Also, I'll give you the advice I was given which was "Force the flash, take the picture outside on a clear sunny day, zoom in with an optical lens, stand far back, and make sure to have your camera's portrait mode on.
Umm. I don't necessarily agree with this. There's nothing actually wrong with most of it, it's just not really conducive to taking good portraits. Here's why I think so, arranged in terms of your points:
1) "Force the flash". I think what you're trying to say here is "Use fill flash." This can be a good idea, provided you use it well. In almost all natural-lighting portraits, you can only pull this off if you can really drill down the flash's TTL reading manually, say to two or three EVs below the default. Why? Because otherwise you get the same horribly washed-out, pasty look that you can get from a point-and-shoot with the flash on. Also, if you're using an on-camera flash, you may want to think twice about using it to fill, since they have a nasty habit of producing a rabbit-in-headlights effect. If you have access to an off-camera flash (or a reflector, etc.) then yes, fill-flash is a great thing and will help out heaps.
2) "Take the picture outside on a clear, sunny day." Well yes, this can be a nice setting for a portrait, if you're sufficiently able to control the subject and the lighting conditions. Problem is, most of the time, you won't be. If you shoot in the middle of the day, you must be careful of a phenomenon known as "raccoon eyes" - shadows falling across the subject's eyes from their eyebrows. (On the other hand, sunset is my favourite time for candid portraiture, since you more-or-less lose this problem and get some gorgeous texturing on faces.)
My real issue with your statement is that portraits can be taken ANYWHERE if you can get the light right (and often, crucially, the white balance). In a dark room with a single overhead fluoro without using a flash - difficult, but not impossible. The trick is learning to take your conditions and get a photo from them. Again, off-camera flashes will help out immeasurably here.
3) "Zoom in with an optical lens." I assume you use
optical as opposed to
digital here, which should be blindingly obvious to begin with - the vast majority of DSLRs don't even have digital zooms for a very good reason, i.e. they're shit. Even getting past that, zooming in has some good points and many bad points. Let's list them:
Good:
- Because you're more distant from the subject, they may be more candid in their actions, allowing you to get a more natural shot.
- Fine-tuning your zoom allows you more control over the composure. (This is a pretty big plus.)
- That's pretty much it.
Bad:
- Because you're zoomed, you're more prone to camera shake. For portraits, you want crispness above all else (you can add a vaseline-lens effect in post-production, but unless you're really sure that's what you're shooting, you do not want it through the lens). Many low-end zoom lenses lose available aperture as they get more zoomed in; my Nikkor 18-135mm, for example, starts at f/3.5 at 18mm but goes to f/5.6 at 135mm, which is absolutely useless for anything that moves. If you're using a low-end DSLR, you may not be able to go higher than, say, ISO 400 before you start getting unacceptable noise. You want a shutter speed no slower than 1/125 to get consistently crisp portraits with any zoom higher than, say, 50mm on a non-full-frame sensor. The constraints are NOT conducive to taking nice portraits - believe me, I've tried.
- Another aspect of the falloff of available aperture with zoom is the loss of a tight depth of field, which is generally highly desirable for portraits.
- Most cheap zoom lenses have optimal optical clarity between about 25mm and 50mm. The more you zoom after that, the more prone you are to things like chromatic aberration, clarity falloff, barrel distortion, etc. These can be corrected in post-production to some extent, but why bother if you don't have to have them to begin with?
- The more zoomed you are, the tighter your perspective. It's a matter of choice, but in my experience, people prefer portraits that have a wider perspective (up to a point - portraits taken at 11mm can look really cool, but more often they can look really munted).
- Did I mention the camera shake thing? It's an absolute show-stopper, even with the vibration-resistance tech in the newer lenses.
4) "Stand far back". Again, you have the benefit of not getting in the persons space, which can be good if you're taking a candid or action portrait. But otherwise, why? Stand where you want if it makes the portrait look good. And, of course, the further back you stand, the more you'll have to zoom in, which leads to all my points above.
5) "Make sure you have your camera's portrait mode on." Alternatively, you could, I don't know, maybe learn how to use your camera. If you have a DSLR and you're only shooting on the automatic modes, you wasted your money - you could get similar results with a good point and shoot. Learn how to use the aperture-priority mode, the shutter-speed-priority mode, the program mode, and (most of all) the manual mode. Learn how to read histograms. If you just trust the metering in your camera, you'll get a few nice exposures, a lot of average exposures, and a fair whack of terrible exposures too.
Also, your pictures look pretty out of focus, I'm not sure if there's an auto focus? Or if you can set it to a reasonable distance when you take pictures?
This is a fair point. If you have any recent combination of DSLR and lens, auto-focus should work out fine. (If it's a prime 50mm, the autofocus should be nails-fast, too.)
Low-light conditions can make life really hard, though, since autofocus relies on light. Most, if not all DSLRs have a little lamp that will light up to help the autofocus do it's thing - make sure this is turned on (you may want to be careful with this at gigs, though, since some musicians get really pissy about having lights shone in their eyes while they're playing). Alternatively, you can try pointing the camera directly at a light source roughly the same distance from your camera's focal plane as the subject, focusing on that by pushing the shutter down halfway, and then recomposing the shot around the subject before fully pressing the shutter. This can work well in some conditions; in others, it won't work at all. Experimentation!
Which leads me to one tip for portraits: focus for the eyes. As above, you can get this with autofocus by simply pointing the little reticule in the middle of the viewfinder at the subject's eyes, holding down the shutter halfway to get the focus, recomposing the shot without moving your finger, and then taking the photo.
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Topic: yay, photography! (thumbnails or links only, pls.) (Read 246737 times)