Portrait Photography | The Power of Simplicity

© 2010 Wazari Wazir | Portrait Photography | Simplicity

“The Ability to Simplify Means to Eliminate the Unnecessary so that the Necessary May Speak.” | Hans Hofmann

When it comes to portrait photography, I like to keep things simple, the first thing that I will pay a very close attention is the background, I will try to find a clean, uncluttered background for my subject. This is vital, this is very important because background can make or break a portrait shot, I don’t want my background to take away viewers attention from the main subject. The background not only have to be clean but the color of the background is also important, it should not be stronger than the colors of the subject clothes.

The most common thing that photographers will do to make a subject or a person to stand out from the background is by using fast lens and open the aperture wide enough, usually somewhere around f1.8 or f2.8, by using this aperture, the background will be out of focus and the subject will be stand out from the background nicely. Even though using wide open aperture will through away the background out of focus, we still need to find the “good background” that will look great when it become out of focus, green foliage like a picture of my son above always look great. In order to have great “Bokeh” I try to photograph my son quite a bit far from the background or the trees, the farther the subject from the background, the larger the “circle” of Bokeh will be.

Why I crop my picture like that? The truth to be told is that my son were sitting on the yellow colored chair, I have to eliminate the chair by cropping it, simply because I think the yellow color will become a distraction, yellow color are stronger than anything in the picture above, I don’t want the color of the chair to take away viewers attention from my son and by removing the unwanted distraction, I get this clean undisturbed shot and the right moment captured when my son adjusting his headgear also make this picture memorable.

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