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terryjohnston:

Title: Brew House.

6 Tips for shooting Environmental Portraits.

1. What is the purpose of your shoot/portrait? This is not only the number one thing you need to understand when shooting an environmental portrait - what are your intentions, where are the photos being used and what is the context of the subject matter? You need to have these answers clearly defined and understood.

2. Get to know the person. It is so obvious that it hardly needs saying, in order to take a picture of the subject’s personality, you need to know something about them. This will also help you answer the questions in Tip Number 1. The worst thing you can do when taking an environmental portrait is to just show up and start taking photos.

3. Posed or Natural/Candid? What a good question! Again Tip Number 1 will help define this and it really comes down to how the photo will be used. Having said that, I prefer a more candid approach. Candid photography is also the truest form of environmental portraiture. The moment the subject becomes aware of the camera, they are likely to be posed, likely to do things they wouldn’t normally do, likely to change their behavior for the sake of the camera.

4. Let your subject talk while you are photographing. An advantage of photographing a person in their own environment is that it is easier to set them at ease. Get them talking and they will soon forget about the camera staring at them. People are also much more animated when talking about something which they love doing, which should make for great pictures.

5. Make the background work. The key to good environmental portraiture is a good environment. Choose a place that tells you something about the model. For a chef, choose a kitchen, for a gardener, pick the vegetable patch. The background is an integral part of the image and should be well thought through. Every visible element should tell us more about the person in the picture. That does of course not mean that we should fill the frame to bursting point with clutter, what it means is that we may have to tidy up, to move things, to rearrange, to do everything possible to make the environment tell us something about it’s owner.

6. Working with light. In studio portraiture, every aspect of lighting is at your mercy, every shade and every highlight can be placed for a reason. In environmental portraiture, this would defeat the purpose. Try to work with the available light, enhancing it with a little bit of flash where needed or bringing in a reflector to soften a shadow here and there, but refrain from overpowering the picture with an elaborate setup, because the light with which the subject surrounds himself tells us a great deal about him.