I will take the sun in my mouth
But maybe that's not really where you want it. Pay attention to where light and shadows are falling on your subject, especially on the face. Remember that the brighter and harder the light, the stronger the shadows on your subject will be. You can lighten them up with a fill flash for a more natural effect, or you can underexpose a little to emphasize the shadows. Don't always aim for the middle ground. A silhouette or a very high-key photo (that is, one with more highlights than shadows and midtones) can make a compelling portrait.

Danger, danger! High voltage!
There's a lot you can do with a flash when your subject is moving, but avoid the kind of flat, blown-out look that results from blasting someone coming right at you with the in-camera flash. You can capture a sharp subject with some peripheral motion blur by using a slow-sync flash. If your camera has a rear-curtain (a.k.a. second-curtain or rear-sync) flash setting, use that to get motion trails behind your subject instead of in front. And if you use a lot of flash, get yourself an external unit.

Want you to know I'm a rainbow too
But that may not work for you photographically. Paying attention to your white-balance setting is important in any sort of portrait because skin tones don't look good with slight color casts. If you're going to use a color cast, make it strong so that everyone can see it's an artistic choice and not jaundice. Tinkering with contrast and saturation settings is another way to create rich skin tones in a portrait. You might want to save that for Photoshop or RAW-file-processing software, but if you have time to experiment with your camera, you can come up with a combination of settings that gives your subjects a distinctive look. To start, try lowering contrast and saturation a couple of notches.

I remember how the darkness doubled
You may have been using the wrong metering mode. For portraits of any kind, using an average metering mode that measures the light in the whole frame to calculate exposure is usually the worst choice. Center-weighted exposure is the most popular mode for shooting portraits, and it works well if the subject is in the middle of the frame or nearly filling it. If you compose your shot with the subject off to one side, a spot meter will help you get the right exposure. Select the spot meter, point your camera straight at the subject, depress the shutter release halfway to lock exposure (most cameras will do this), then reframe your image for the composition you want and shoot.

Sends me into hyperspace when I see her pretty face
OK, but don't become fixated on the face. Since we human beings have a ceaseless fascination with other people's faces, that's what most portraits show. But you can compose a shot that doesn't even include the face to reveal something distinctive and expressive about a person, especially when that person is moving around.


Note: This article has been revised from the original. Pictures courtesy of Vipula Samarakoon and CNET.co.uk.

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