Portrait Photography How To

All photos © Joyce Tenneson

As one of today's most successful and influential photographers, Joyce Tenneson has a unique gift for portraying a person's true character in her images. This ability to reveal the true persona in her portrait subjects has become her signature style--one that elicits an emotional response from the viewer.

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Several years ago, singer Paula Cole posed the musical question, "Where have all the cowboys gone?" Apparently, photographer Kendall Nelson has the answer. In her book, Gathering Remnants: A Tribute to the Working Cowboy, Nelson delivers a starkly beautiful pictorial essay on the lives of cowboys who live on working ranches in the American west. For about three and a...

Many portrait photographers employ a portable light to boost ambient illumination and fill in shadows when shooting outdoors. In the four-minute video below you’ll see how simple diffusion panels can modify the quality of light and give you exactly the look you’re after.

Sometimes it’s great to get outdoors and shoot environmental portraits with a real backdrop like Colorado’s Flatiron Mountains outside of Boulder. The problem is that unless you have some sweet golden-hour light, the harsh midday sun can make such a task very difficult.

Shutterbug columnist Scott Kelby recently gave a great lecture on the ethics of portrait retouching, and offered some valuable tips on how to improve your people pictures without making your subjects look fake.

We usually turn to Mathieu Stern for insight on adapting bargain vintage lenses for use with modern digital cameras. But in the quick video below, Stern gives a 30-second tutorial on making eyes “pop” with Photoshop.

Have you ever captured a photo, looked at it on your camera’s LCD, and said to yourself, “Wow! This looks perfect,” only to view the image closely on the computer and find a bunch of distracting imperfections? If that’s a familiar scenario, this tutorial is for you.