A really great book on portrait photography

jfriend

In the last few years, I've bought quite a few books on portrait photography trying to learn about poses, lighting, creative options, etc... All were helpful, but most were really not as good as I thought they could be.

The last one I bought and just finished reading is an excellent book. It's called "Digital Portrait Photography and Lighting: Taking Memorable Shots Every Time".

In a nutshell, it contains the most information I've seen that you can just start to apply whether you're taking family snapshots, capturing a big family gathering or planning a more formal portrait.

Here's the basic chapter outline:

Chapter 1: Discussed the various different kinds of portraits
Chapter 2: A review or primer on camera and equipment basics
Chapter 3: A primer on lighting
Chapter 4: Different types of portraits and when to use them
Chapter 5: Posing techniques
Chapter 6: Advanced combinations of lighting and poses
Chapter 7: Outdoor portraits
Chapter 8: Existing light portraiture indoors
Chapter 9: Studio portraiture
Chapters 10-12: Post processing portraits

Out of eight total books on lighting and portraits I've seen, this was clearly the best. Even if you're in a hurry, you can jump to chapter 5 and immediately learn a bunch of useful things about posting your subject (shoulder angle, head tilt, camera height, etc...). This stuff will even apply if it's just your kids you're taking pictures of.

Here's the Amazon link if you want to check it out.

my3peas

Thanks for posting this!

saurora

Thanks for posting this. I have been looking around for some decent books and not finding anything that looks promising. I will check it out! I'm also looking for portraiture book(s) by famous photographers that are good if anyone knows of something that moves them, let me know! :saurora

DavidTO

John,

Can I add this to our book review section?

jfriend

Sure

DavidTO wrote:

John,

Can I add this to our book review section?

Sure.