Stylised portraits can be the most fun to create, especially if you enjoy overcoming technical challenges. For this shot, I needed to make a bright sky look like night-time, and match the model’s pose to the mood of the set-up. This is one of the trickiest images from our book, Mastering Portrait Photography. It was shot for an old friend of the studio who wanted to create some ‘horror-novel-inspired-images’ for a project for her fashion degree. I knew the location …
No studio? No problem. It’s cheaper than ever to get flash guns that you can use on- or off-camera. In fact, some enterprising brands are now offering complete sets of flash guns with transmitters and receivers for under £200. With a little bit of thought and one or two light modifiers (including a simple white-painted wall), you can recreate studio-style portraits in any location. In this video, my friend, neighbour and very patient portrait sitter Bob steps into the studio. …
Whenever your camera isn’t in full manual mode, it measures the amount of light reflected from the scene (a process called ‘metering’) and uses inbuilt algorithms to decide how to set the aperture, shutter speed and/or ISO. The camera doesn’t understand what exactly you are trying to capture, so by default chooses exposure settings that result in the tones in the image averaging to a mid-grey tone. Adjusting the metering mode changes which parts of the image frame the camera …