Video: Five common portrait photography mistakes and how to fix them
If you've ever been frustrated by your own efforts when it comes to taking portraits, or wondered just how professional photographers are able to shoot portraits so consistently, then this new video by portrait photographer Miguel Quiles is just for you.
In the video Quiles looks at five of the most common portrait photography mistakes you might be making and some techniques for avoiding or fixing them.
in case you don't have a spare seven minutes for the video, the TL;DR (TL;DW?) is as below:
- Missing Focus – Don’t wait until after you take the image to realise you missed critical focus.
- Poor Composition – It's not up to your viewer to work out where to look - it's up to you.
- Photoshop Gymnastics – Don’t spend hours trying to fix a bad image in post. Get it right first time, or use it as a lesson for next time to focus on things like lighting, composition and other issues.
- Adding Watermarks – This may be controversial, but we agree when Quiles says you rarely see top photographers using large, distracting watermarks. Consider not watermarking your images, or embedding the information in the EXIF data instead.
- Over-Retouching – There's a fine line between an image that's been tastefully edited, and one that looks like it's just visited a plastic surgeon. Take it easy, and tread lightly with retouching.
You can see more of Miguel Quiles great videos on YouTube.