Applying Portrait Photography Techniques - Ian Niblack

              My name is Ian Niblack, and I have always been intrigued by photography, but more specifically portrait photography. I find it fun to take candid pictures of people, or even planned photos, as well as being in them. I love the way a moment in time can be captured and remembered forever. But I've never really gone in depth with the intricacy surrounding photography until now. Using the book, "Photography: Guide to Taking Beautiful Digital Pictures, Photographs and compositions" by Nicole Woods, I was able to discover new techniques and apply them to taking portrait photos.



        Before, when I took Portrait shots, I would honestly just go for the shot without really paying much attention to detail, but after discovering new techniques from my book, I will now have good skills and habits to apply to my portrait shots forever. from the book I learned that I need a low aperture to give the image a shallow depth of field, which helps blur the background of a shot and focus in on the details of the subject's features. On Page 28 of my book, it says "It's better for portraits to have a shallow depth of field -- that way, your subject will be in crisp focus, while the background will be gently blurred." Taking this advice, I set the aperture on my camera to 4.5, so that the picture wasn't too dark in the lowly lit room, and so that I could apply a shallow depth of field to the portrait image.


I also decided to go with black and white for this photo, because it gives a more somber and smooth tone to the photo, and Black and White really helped me to express that into this image. In my book, on page 19, it says "Black and white and Sepia are very special ways of presenting images of a certain type and can really give you good results."

Thank you for Reading!