Portrait photography tip: Choose your background first

Thursday 12 March 2020, 13:31 by Elja Trum | 4,450 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

When you take a photo on location, the background is important in your photo. You certainly do not always have to look for a beautiful view. A simple, fairly neutral background often works perfectly well.

Tsjora - f/2.8, 1/125s, 100 ISO @ 145mm
It is a good idea to look for the background before bringing in your model.
So take a walk around the location beforehand.

You can easily determine whether a background will work when it appears blurred in your photo by almost closing your eyes and looking through your eyelashes. This means you mainly see dark and light areas and blur. It is a bit like how your background will look when blurred in the photo.

Alternatively, you can of course focus your camera up close. You can now look through the viewfinder or at your screen for a background that looks good.

Found a background?
Put your model in front of it and start shooting.

In the photo above, model Tsjora was standing in front of a concrete wall. This makes the background fairly neutral, but it contains enough variation to stop it becoming a boring flat surface.

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About the author

Elja Trum is the founder of Photofacts and online photography course website Photofacts Academy. He has been writing about photography since 2006. Elja is also the author of (Dutch) books on composition, black-and-white photography, flash photography and portrait photography.

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Elja Trum

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Would you like to take better photos and keep up with what is happening in photography? Photofacts publishes articles that teach you something about photography — from a product announcement to a practical shooting tip or a look at a website. Photofacts covers photography every day and is a hobby project of Elja Trum's that got out of hand. The articles are written by a team of volunteer authors. If you would enjoy writing one or more articles for Photofacts, do get in touch.More about Photofacts

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