Tips For Family Portrait Photography | Keep it Simple

© 2012 Wazari Wazir | My Family Photography Outing | Hulu Langat Selangor

When it comes to my family portrait photography, I like to keep it simple, so that the eyes will be drawn towards the main subject, which in this case is my family. Among the best kept secret in portrait photography especially is to keep it simple, meaning if we wanted to photograph someone, chose a plain background, with less distracting elements. That’s why in the old days majority of portrait photography were taken inside the studio, where there is only the subject and plain background.

Nowadays people like their picture taken outdoors, with nature or any environment tat they feel comfortable with. This photograph use environment as their background but this image does not qualified as to be called as environmental portrait, simply because the background has no context towards the subject, meaning that, they don’t have strong connection with the subject, they don’t have strong story to connect with the subject unless this picture were taken at children playground or theme park, then the background plays an important role enhancing the story of the photograph.

This pictures of my family were taken by the roadside in Hulu Langat Selangor. On the right side of this picture where I photograph them is a main road towards one of the popular picnic area for the people of Kuala Lumpur during weekend, just a little bit more than half and hour drive from Kuala Lumpur, they can unwind with the countryside environment.

The background of this pictures is nothing more than the road and few houses that does not add to the context of the photographs, so I decided to keep this picture simple by throwing away the background, using large f/2.8 aperture and keep the framing tight, so there is not much distracting elements that will take away the focus from the main subject in this particular photographs, which is my family.

The whole point of this post is about keeping it simple, choose a plain background that will make your subject stand out and choose the largest  aperture that your lens have to throw away the background and please be remind that when you ares using large aperture, the depth of field will be shallow, if you are not careful with your focusing and handling of the lens, the picture will probably come out blur, so make sure that you use fast shutter speed.

For this photograph, I’,m using 70-200mm lens and using shutter speed between 1/300 – 1/600, why there is a different in shutter speeds? Because this photographs were taken outdoors, sometime it gets too bright and sometimes the sun get covered by the clouds, but I try to keep my shutter speed no less than 1/250 when using 70-200mm handheld. I keep the ISO at 200 and I will increase the ISO to 400 if needed depending on the lighting situation, so that I can keep shooting at the higher shutter speeds. Other than those technical things, keep it simple and when taking your family portrait, let them play and interact with each others so that you will have much better pictures than a formal family photograph.

*if you are interested about the tone in the photographs above, just click the banner below to find out…