Portrait Photography How To

Our friends at the Cooperative of Photography (COOPH) are back with a new collection of fun photo hacks, designed to boost your creativity and help you achieve several zany effects. And, as always, these hacks require nothing more than a few household items you already own.

The eight tips in the video below are all designed to help you create wacky portraits at home, without spending a dime on specialized photo accessories or messing around with post processing gimmicks. One of our favorite techniques is to use a fast shutter speed or flash, and throw water on your subject while capturing the shot.

You’ll also see how to use hand-drawn overlays or an image on your phone to give a model interesting eyes or an oversized mouth with a huge smile.  Other tricks tricks involve multiple exposures or the creative use of props.

And if making creepy portraits is your thing, you’ll see how to do that by using clear tape to distort a model’s facial features, or create a mummified look by wrapping a face with colored string. Another image-altering trick is to press a subject’s face against a pane of glass before you snap the shutter.

Watch the video to see how to accomplish these and other portrait tricks, and be sure to look at an earlier tutorial we posted with five more hacks that don't cost anything to create. You can find more fun stuff on the COOPH YouTube channel.