How's it going, everyone! My name is Miguel Quiles, I'm a Sony Artisan of Imagery
and in this video, I'm gonna share with you five tips that you can use to take better portraits today.
My first tip to kick this off is you must communicate with your subjects.
It is really really important that not just at the beginning, the middle and the end of your photoshoot
that you have constant communication with the person that you're photographing.
It could be small talk in the beginning of the weather, how their commute was, really anything.
You want to get them to open up and get them to start talking to you
because what's gonna happen is as you're going throughout the photoshoot,
they're gonna get into their heads, they're gonna have their own little mental conversations
that they're gonna have with themselves.
And it's usually not positive.
So it's really important to drown out that kind of negative internal conversation
that might be happening with your own funny and humorous conversation that you might have.
So, very important tip because really everything else falls apart without it,
you must communicate.
Tip number two I think is one that will really help you to get better compositions in your portraits
and that's to enable the gridlines within your camera.
What I end up doing really often is I'll have my rule of thirds grid and there's actually one
that's a rule of thirds that has kind of a diagonal cross on it
and I use that to be able to help me to compose my portraits.
So even if I'm shooting a tight close-up portrait, what I'll end up doing is
I'll take the top line on the rule of thirds grid and I'll put it somewhere near the person's eyes.
Sometimes, it intersects directly through the eyes, sometimes a little above,
sometimes a little below, but enabling your gridlines and using it during
every single portrait shoot is gonna help you to get better compositions.
Tip number three I think is one that will help you to make easy work out of any portrait session
and that's to bring something like a 24-70mm lens on your shoot.
Listen, you might go into a scenario thinking that you're gonna shoot some wide environmental portraits,
but maybe the environment just isn't that interesting and you end up having to switch gears a little bit.
So what I love about that scenario is that if you have a 24-70mm, it really doesn't matter
whether the environment is great or not.
You have that flexibility to shoot something that's a little bit tighter,
shoot something wide if you need to or really get a mix of both worlds.
Being able to take care of any scenario that you might run into is to have that versatility,
have that Swiss Army knife of a lens,
24-70mm will help you out tremendously.
Tip number four on my list is that you really need to help your subjects to pose.
And so it's not as kind of scary as one might think.
One of the things that really helps me to help other people to pose is to use something like a
mood board where I'll download an app something like Pinterest for example
where I'll take photographs that I really love, the way that the person is posing in the photo
and it's just as easy as me just showing them the photo and saying 'Hey, I want you to pose like this.'
And the big thing to understand is that not every person is gonna look good in a certain pose.
So you can't just have one pose and say hey just pose like this for the entire shoot.
You want to have a bunch of different poses. So create those mood boards,
those will help you to be able to help people to pose better.
Tip number five is to make sure that you're using gear that makes life really easy for you.
For example, for me, I've been shooting portraits for many years and one of the things
that I love about shooting specifically with cameras like the Sony a7R IV
is that it takes the technical side of taking a portrait and it kind of takes it off the plate for me
to where I could focus more on the creative elements of a portrait shoot.
Whether it be posing, whether it be communicating, all the tips that I just talked to you about
are things that I could focus on when I'm not having to worry about the technical side of things
like making sure their eye is in focus because the camera does that for me.
You have Continuous Eye Autofocus, so I'm ensured that the eyes are always going to be sharp and in focus.
So these are things that you should rely on the camera to take care of some of that heavier technical side of things,
so that it frees you up to do some of the more creative things.
I hope you all enjoyed the video, make sure that you subscribe to the channel while you're here
and also check out the next video which is going to be my favorite lenses for shooting portraits.