Introduction to Environmental Portraiture

What is Environmental Portraiture

An environmental portrait is a portrait taken in the subject’s usual environment, such as in their home or workplace, and typically illuminates the subject’s life and surroundings. The term is most frequently used of a genre of photography.

By photographing a person in their natural surroundings, it is thought that you will be able to better illuminate their character, and therefore portray the essence of their personality, rather than merely a likeness of their physical features. It is also thought that by photographing a person in their natural surroundings, the subject will be more at ease, and so be more conducive to expressing themselves, as opposed to in a studio, which can be a rather intimidating and artificial experience.

Mood Board of Environmental Portraiture

Common challenges when shooting environmental portraits

If you’re unable to get to the location before the shoot, perhaps the greatest challenge with this type of photography is working with and overcoming the unknown. Often with environmental portraits you don’t really know what you’re dealing with — who you’re photographing, what they look like, what they’ll be wearing, what the location is like or what sort of lighting there is. This means, as the photographer, you have to be able to think on your feet and overcome these challenges when you arrive.

Here are some of the common challenges summarised into these key points here.

Time – Perhaps the greatest challenge on any photoshoot is a lack of time. Often we only have a small window of time, but numerous obstacles to overcome. Even if you’ve researched the location prior to the shoot, you have to be prepared to think on your feet.

Photographing on location – When working on location you don’t know what you’ll be working with until you arrive. Locations may be cluttered, busy with people and generally just not what you expect. Be prepared for this and know that you might have to look for the right space or even rearrange items.

Lighting – Lighting on location is something that many photographers struggle with. In many cases it’s common that you’ll be working with mixed lighting as the available light alone may not be sufficient, while other instances may require purely studio lighting if there is no suitable ambient light, so make sure to be prepared with two or three lights and some modifiers that could work for a variety of scenarios.

Communicating with your subject –As with any portrait, building a connection with your subject is key if you want to get natural-looking results. The key thing here is to be confident as this will help put your subject at ease. Even if you don’t have a lot of time, take a moment to talk to your subject, explain what you’re doing and what you want to achieve. Talk them through the shoot to help them feel comfortable as this will make the experience more rewarding for everyone involved.

Environmental Photoshoots

For my Photoshoot I tried to take a Variety of Photographs of people within their Environment. Some have arguable points that they are Portraits while others do not. I.e Motorcycle helmet photos.

I found a website going into detail about Portrait Photography as they said that Portraits are often more dramatic, are less smiley, etc. In portraiture subject often is looking away from the camera or is engaging in some kind of activity. Again, “portraits are more about telling a story”. Almost all of my Photos are telling a Story or engaging in an Activity.

To Back this up further Portrait photography is all about capturing the essence of a person, their personality, and emotions, regardless of what they’re wearing. Helmets can add an interesting element to the portrait, showing a different side of the person being photographed. So, a photograph of someone wearing a helmet can still be considered portrait photography because it’s about capturing the individual, their story, and their uniqueness.

Contact Sheet

Photographs Before VS After

Something that I have noticed with my Dirt Bike Photographs and a few other ones is that they are quite dull and monochromatic. Adjusting the Vibrancy option in Adobe Photoshop added the colour necessary to make my images stand out. These are the settings that I used to achieve this.

And these are the results that have been produced.

When I used the same Vibrancy for these Photographs it turned my Photographs into an orange colour, almost as if switching on a Thermal filter, which did not look as amazing as I had hoped.