Portrait photography or portraiture in photography is a photograph of a person or group of people that captures the personality of the subject by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses. A portrait picture might be artistic, or it might be clinical, as part of a medical study. Frequently, portraits are commissioned for special occasions, such as weddings or school events.Portraits can serve many purposes, from usage on a personal Web site to display in the lobby of a business.

History

The relatively low cost of the daguerreotype in the middle of the 19th century and the reduced sitting time for the subject, though still much longer than now, led to a general rise in the popularity of portrait photography over painted portraiture.  The style of these early works reflected the technical challenges associated with long exposure times and the painterly aesthetic of the time. Hidden mother photography, in which portrait photographs featured young children’s mothers hidden in the frame to calm them and keep them still, arose from this difficulty. Subjects were generally seated against plain backgrounds and lit with the soft light of an overhead window and whatever else could be reflected with mirrors. Advances in photographic equipment and techniques developed, and gave photographers the ability to capture images with shorter exposure times and the making of portraits outside the studio.

Experimenting with portraits:

I experimented to take portrait photographs at school so i grabbed a camera from my class and went to the schools studio and my photography teacher was happy to help by being my model and this is what i came up with:

As you can see i crossed some pictures that are not worthy, the ones crossed with  blue color were too dark, the red ones were wrong timing and the green ones were out of focus.

Final outcomes:

This is my favorite one because the face expression of the model gave a lot of meaning to the photograph. in this photograph it was taken inside the schools studio using a trigger flash, in which a Bluetooth device is connected on the camera and as soon as the photograph is taken it triggers the flash light its connected to.  And as you can see only the front of his face is lighten meanwhile his sides are dark and that’s because the studio room was dark and the only light was the one pointed on his face.

 

This is also a good photograph with a good face expression and as you can see unlike the other photo only one side of his face is dark here and that’s because an extra studio light was added pointed to the side of his face.