Photo Tip of the Week: The Forgotten Portrait Subject: The Setting
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- Strive to incorporate the environment in which you find your subject to give viewers more information about who the subject might be.
- When shooting portraits, alter your perspective in relation to the subject. Take some shots from down low looking up, and from up high looking down. Remember to look for textures, patterns, or other interesting elements in the environment to keep the image eye-catching.
- Compose some of your portraits from afar, putting some measure of distance between you and your subject. A wide-angle lens will allow you to get more of the surroundings without being too far away while a telephoto lens will allow you to get a good amount of distance to put your subject in a greater context.
- Include activities in your portraits when appropriate. Having your subject engage in a hobby, for example, will help them relax in front of the camera while also giving viewers more information about who the subject is and what they do in their daily life.
- Strive to incorporate the environment in which you find your subject to give viewers more information about who the subject might be.
Clearly, when you take a portrait, the model is the primary focus of the image. The whole purpose of a portrait is to help viewers connect with the person you’ve got in front of your camera. But, the setting in which you photograph your subject can provide viewers with a window into who the subject is (or who you want the subject to be). That’s why incorporating the setting into your portraits is so important.
Our free, in-depth Tip of the Week this week is all about the portrait setting, why it’s so important, and how you can incorporate it into your images more easily.
Why Setting is So Important
Providing some context to your portraits can facilitate the creation of a deeper connection between viewers and your subject. The subject’s surroundings can inform us about aspects of their life that would otherwise be left out of the image – who they are, what they do, and where they are from, for example.
Incorporating the setting allows us to capture behavior and highlight relationships. In the image above, the inclusion of the field and the forest in the background gives us some possible insight into where this baby will grow up – probably somewhere in the American West. Whether or not that’s the case, the photographer has at least planted that seed for us to ponder. This wouldn’t have been the case had the image been framed more tightly.
Including the setting can also help make the unfamiliar or the misunderstood more clear. This is an especially good trick when the subject is someone from a culture or society that is unfamiliar to the viewer. In the image above, the inclusion of the tropical forest in the background gives us a little insight into where this young woman might live, perhaps on an island in the South Pacific. Again, whether our assumption is or is not true, the setting at least gets us wondering more about who this girl might be.
The beauty of showing the surrounding environment in portrait is that these more in-depth looks at people can be achieved by simply adding a little setting to the frame – their living room, their garden, or their place of work are all potential settings that will give us more information about who the subject is based on the things they have chosen to surround themselves with. The setting in the image above is quite simple – a small hut. But the volume of information that simple setting provides us about how the subjects of the image live is expansive.
Alter Your Perspective
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A great way to incorporate the surrounding environment into a portrait is to change the angle from which you take your shots. A portrait taken from eye level can generate great results, as seen in the image above. We get a good view of the environment in which the woman and the little girl live, and understand that they live a very simple life as a result.
But getting down low can help provide viewers with a better understanding of the environment as well. For example, shots from down low are a great idea if you’re in a city so that you can capture the buildings around the model, or in a forest, so you can incorporate the forest canopy. Capturing the sky, as was done in the image above, is yet another example of how shooting upwards toward your subject allows you to incorporate interesting elements in the background for an improved shot.
Getting higher than your model and shooting downward opens many possibilities as well. Perhaps they are standing the foyer of a building with an interesting pattern on the floor, are in front of a wall that has lines and textures that add dimension to the shot, or are standing in a field of sunflowers, as in the image above. Whatever the case, capturing a portrait from above allows you to place a greater emphasis on your subject’s interaction with the environment around them, and makes for a unique perspective for a portrait as well.
Alter Your Distance
Part of incorporating the setting in which a subject lives, works, or plays is taking a wider shot. You can remain relatively close to the subject but use a wide-angle lens to capture a wider swath of their environment, as was done in the image above. Doing so gives viewers the opportunity to learn about this woman’s environment, without sacrificing the intricate details of her body decorations.
Another option is to use a telephoto lens from a point further away from your subject, as was done in this wedding image. Although the distance from the camera to the subjects is relatively large, viewers can still make out details about the subjects while also getting a great view of their surrounding environment.
However, a note of caution: finding the right distance and the right amount of environment to incorporate into the shot is a delicate balance. While you want to be able to tell a larger story of who the subject is and what they are doing, you don’t want to lose sight of the fact that the person you’re photographing is the primary focal point. Just be sure that you aren’t sacrificing details of the subject to get details of their environment. It should be an equal interplay between the two, as was accomplished in the image above.
Incorporate Activities
Portraits that show the subject doing something – working, engaging in a hobby, or participating in a family event, for example – give viewers a much more intimate look at who the person really is. Portraits that are taken in the midst of an activity can be far more genuine than more formally posed shots because the subject has an opportunity to relax and genuinely engage in an aspect of their daily life. As you can see in the image above, this portrait helps us make determinations about the subjects that would have been impossible otherwise. We know they dance, we know they are in a gym, and we know they are athletically talented. None of this would have been evident in a posed portrait in a studio.
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Conclusion
Although portraits are about people, including the environment in which they live can give us far deeper insights into who they are than a tightly framed shot of their head and shoulders or a formally posed studio shot. As you can see from the example photos we’ve included in this lesson, including the setting can help you create a more dynamic, informative image, even if the setting is of something as simple as a person’s home.
So, next time you set out to take a portrait, try to alter your perspective or distance, or take an image of your subject taking part in an activity. The results can be truly stunning!