Shooting RAW:
When you want to achieve a professional, high quality photo, it is always important to shoot in manual mode. This way you will have more control over lighting and depth of field. Another very important setting, which will help you if you want to edit your photos is the ‘RAW’ option in your menu.
Selecting the image quality to be ‘RAW’ when in your DSLR cameras menu will ensure that all the important data captured will not be compressed or lost. This way if you accidentally underexpose, or overexpose you will be able to recover a lot more detail than if you shot regularly in JPEG format.
Lenses and settings:
A great portrait lens that is very versatile and commonly used is a 50mm f1.8. This is a great lens as it has a very low f.stop number which allows for greater depth of field and the size being 50mm is nice as it sits in between being a wide angle (e.g: 24mm) or a telephoto (100mm) lens.
When shooting portraits of people, or even animals outside it is important to consider how harsh natural sunlight is. Most photographers like to shoot early in the morning or in the late afternoon when the sun is not as bright and doesn’t cause strange shadowing on models faces.
The best setting for outdoor shooting is to have a fast shutter such as 1/1500 because you want to keep your aperture wide. Which ever kind of lens you’re shooting on it is always best to set your aperture to the lowest number such as 1.8 for the 50mm lens. This way the depth of field will be as shallow as possible creating the background to be very blurred and your subject will have the most focus.
Rule of Thirds:
The rule of thirds is a great composition technique to keep in mind when posing your subjects and framing them. It often looks more interesting and dynamic to have a subject slightly off centre rather than always framing them right in the middle. The rule of thirds will also help you to correctly frame a subject without leaving too much, or not enough head room. As the rule of thirds states, it is a great idea to imagine a grid when shooting and always place your subjects eyes a long the first horizontal line, this will help the rest of your picture to also fall into the rule of thirds.
