How to Make Your Friends Look Good in Portraits

There is a famous saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Similarly, a good portrait is one that tells you the whole story behind it. The best thing about making a friends’ portrait is that you know your friends. You know what kind of a person your friend is and what would make your friend look good.

The key to the right picture is the camera. The camera you use is very important when it comes to photography. You cannot simply have a good portrait using your phone as a camera. You need to have a high definition camera that gives you different options and modes to work with. Once you get yourself a decent camera to work with you need to know all of its functionalities. Play around with it until you know each and every function that the camera has. This helps when deciding what kind of a photo you want to take.

After you’ve self-educated yourself on how to use the camera you move forward to your friend. There are different types of portraits you can work on. There are the up-close portraits which capture the facial features, and then there are the portraits that capture your personality through your dressing and surroundings. You need to figure out how your portrait will best describe your friend.

A good way to work on your friend’s portrait is to focus on their most vibrant feature. That feature can be anything ranging from coloured eyes to the long masculine beard to the tall height of your friend. This gives you something to work around and keeps focus on something that is very unique and distinctive about your friend. This technique is mostly used while working on the up-close portraits.

A good technique for other portraits is to play with different angles. The standard, cliché way to take a photo is from the eye level of your friend. That is the normal and boring way but if you want the portrait to be something that is out of the box and which will capture the viewer you should try unique angles. You can try taking pictures putting the camera on the floor, from above your friend or tilting the camera at an angle that gives an interesting impact.

A good portrait has the right amount of lighting and the right background. What is in the background is just as important as what the focus is on in a picture. The lighting should be used in a way that brings out the main feature in the portrait.

There are many other ways to make people look good in portraits and I’m sure I haven’t been able to mention all of them so if there are any good tips and techniques do share with me.