The importance of backgrounds in portrait photography

Introduction

Almost every single compelling portrait owes its success to its background, for no real good portrait photo is successful without the right hint of a completing, well contrasting background. How many times have you seen a really good composition with the right subject in the right place in the right time, if it only wasn’t for that tree sticking out of their head, or that distracting couple talking at the far corner of your composition?

For you to be a good people photographer, you need to get used to taking an extra few seconds to check out your subject’s background and making sure everything is in its right place to complement your subject of interest instead of competing with it for attention.

There’s of course a few tips and tricks that can help you produce your desired perfect piece of portraiture:

Go wide with telephoto lenses

The most preferable way to get right blurred backgrounds for portraiture is to use telephoto lenses with wide aperture openings (small f-stop numbers) for achieving shallow depth of field (the area in front and to the back of the point of interest in a photo that is in sharp focus) which can become very much helpful for having a well defined dominating focal point in your exposure, which of course, 99% of the time is the human figure in a portrait. Wide opening helps giving all attention to a fully framed subject in a composition throwing everything else right out of focus.

Your choice of aperture and lens can make or break a shot. So if you want to achieve an isolating (also referred to as singular-theme composition) you would want to use wider aperture openings with longer lenses increasing the visual weight of your shot’s point of interest. In the same sense, if you want to achieve a story telling composition you might want to go with narrower aperture openings with shorter focal lengths, such as when for example you want to capture a farmer on his truck with his field of wheat. And this is what’s meant by storytelling, it’s having your subject in context with their surroundings revealing their state.

Experiment with angles

Many photographers think that portraiture photography is best practiced at eye level, especially when all you have a short focal length lens, but that cannot be any further from the truth. To get your perfect, compelling portrait you should sometimes go wild, shoot down on your subject from up above, or shoot up at them from down below. This way you can take advantage of the vivid blue sky, or bright green grass to serve as your beautiful background. You can also try varying distances from you subjects. Up close, a bit far, in between. Experiment, experiment, and then experiment some more. That’s the key. You should learn how to WORK IT!! You should be in control while making your subject feel at ease and have them feel free to act themselves.

Experiment with backgrounds

The person in your photo is obviously your main interest in a shot, so you would want to go with minimalist backgrounds to help that subject stand out. But other times, a colorful dramatic background will help put your subject into context and dramatically alter the mood of your shot. Once again you need to EXPERIMENT!!

Colorful fabric to serve as the right background when there isn’t any

A good trick to use is to always carry a few colorful pieces of cloth with you that you can use as an out-of-focus background to your subject when there isn’t any good natural background. You can have someone hold the piece of cloth around 10 feet to the back of your subject and with a wide opening you can focus on your subject and throw those beautiful patterns of bright colors out-of-focus, having a strong impact on your main point of interest with a beautiful vague contrasting background complimenting it.

Look for contrast

Contrast, as the Wikipedia definition suggests is, the difference in visual properties that makes an object (or its representation in an image) distinguishable from other objects and the background. In visual perception of the real world, contrast is determined by the difference in the color and brightness of the object and other objects within the same field of view. Because the human visual system is more sensitive to contrast than absolute luminance, we can perceive the world similarly regardless of the huge changes in illumination over the day or from place to place.

I had a shooting session for a magazine a few days ago with some kids dressed in white and playing yoga. The theme was having those kids practicing their yoga in nature. I took a few shots here and there, and when I got back home, downloaded those photos onto my PC, I of course went through them. There were some brilliant photos. But I was very bummed when I realized that the shot I liked the most was shot against a white wall. Now with the kids all dressed in white, they could hardly be distinguished from the wall. And of course, I could not present my favorite photo to the author of the magazine article, and this is something I wish for no one to experience.

Now, to make a conclusion of this incident. What I should have done is, watch out for my background. If I had taken the few seconds before pushing that shutter release button to look around and behind my subjects, I would’ve seen that I should’ve changed my position, and placed myself in front of the vividly glowing green grass and my shot would’ve been nothing less than perfect. But I didn’t, so it wasn’t. So you should always look out for contrasting backgrounds to complement you subjects and complete your shots.

Here’s a technique I once read about for assessing contrast in your shots. It’s not conventional but it sure helps a lot. The human eye can perceive light and color information better than the best camera, so this techniques says that you need to close one eye, and squint the other to help you perceive a view as the camera would. So this way, you’ll basically be taking out much of the details of the view and leaving yourself with the highlights and shadows of the scene (you’re stripping the scene of most mid tones) and this way you will be able to better apprehend your scene the way your camera will.

Conclusion

As photographers, we often are taken by our subject and we focus all our attention on how to get them right that we forget to think about what’s going on behind them, and we end up with perfectly posed subjects and a very busy, poorly contrasted, or sharply focused backgrounds degrading the beauty of our main attention and the shot over all. It only takes us a few moments to give a little attention to what’s going on in the scene and look at it as a whole before making our exposure and recording that moment till the rest of time.