Twelve Weeks to Better Photos: Week Nine, Portraits

This week's lesson is all about taking photos of people.... although in my world "people" also includes pets! Who doesn't love a good pet portrait? The full PDF for the lesson can be found here.

Tips for Taking Portraits

- Capture catchlights if you can (catchlights are those great lights in people's eyes)
- Keep your background simple so the focus remains on your subject
- Use a shallow depth of field (open up that aperture!) when you can, but for larger groups of people use a higher f/stop so everyone is in focus
- Have a few good jokes to tell to get natural smiles (or in the case of dogs, treats!)
- Consider a zoom lens to catch your subject unaware
- If you're photographing more than one person, have them interact (touching, laughing, etc.)

The Assignment

This week's assignment should be pretty obvious: take some portrait photos! I got pretty busy this week so I didn't have much dedicated time to take photos, but here's what I've got. They are portraits of dogs. I know, you're shocked ;)

First up is my little dude Nemo.



And here is one of the dogs in my rescue group (such a cutie!).




What I Learned

I still need to work on getting myself in front of the camera. I had so many good intentions to take a couple self-portraits for this assignment, but I just couldn't make it happen. Believe it or not, I've gotten a lot better about being photographed (mostly because I'm my own photographer and can change things as I like), but I still have a long way to go. Given the number of photos I take, I should really have a few more of myself. And of my husband for that matter. I guess I really just tend to forget about taking pictures of people in general. Oops.

Sill following along? Here's the link up!


I'm leaving the linky party open for the duration of the entire 12 weeks so you can link up as you do the lessons on your own.

Coming up next week: Landscapes! How to take beautiful shots of wide open spaces.