Creative portrait ideas: 8 tips for an original portrait

8 tips for an original portrait

Step outside your comfort zone with these creative portrait ideas

You can probably come up with plenty of portrait ideas: indoors, outdoors, a coloured background or a bokeh effect, and so on. We’d like to challenge you, so we’ve gathered eight different, creative portrait ideas to inspire you.

1. Write with light

Portrait photography usually requires plenty of light, but what if you don’t have it to hand and it’s already dark outside? Then create your own great situations! You can also write with light. With a sparkler, a tube light or simply your phone’s torch, you can create cool effects. By setting your camera to a slow shutter speed and a low ISO, you can capture the light beautifully. For example, you can walk behind someone with the light or even draw a heart around a couple.

2. Shoot a monochrome portrait

We often match clothes, colours and backgrounds to each other. If you’re wearing bright colours, the background is often light, or vice versa. But you can also make everything the same colour. Have your model wear a pink shirt in front of a pink background, with pink props and make-up. You can make it even more monochrome by using light of the same colour too. It sounds bold, and it is, but it can turn out really cool.

3. Put something in front of your lens

It may sound strange, but placing an object in front of your lens can create amazing effects. For example, use a prism to create a so-called ‘disco glow’ on a portrait. Tights can come in handy too: stretch a pair of beige tights over your lens to give your portraits a vintage look and feel. You can also use gobos, or light stencils. With a gobo you can cast light in specific lines and shapes onto your model’s face for a striking effect. No gobo at home? Try a comb, which also spreads the light across your model in lines.

4. Use different props

When you get started with portrait photography, you can choose to use props. Think of flowers, for example. Your subject can hold the flowers, lie among them, or you can work flowers into the make-up. Besides flowers, you could also choose balloons, food, soap bubbles, feathers or fans: let your imagination run wild!

5. Go for colour

When shooting a portrait, you can play even more with colour. For example, place a coloured ring light in the background or aim a coloured lamp at your model’s face. This lets you create fantastic effects. Also try using a colour filter. It gives your photo a completely new atmosphere within seconds. It’s great fun to experiment with surprising colours in your portrait!

6. Play with light

Besides coloured light, you can also play with daylight or continuous lights. For example, try a so-called low key portrait. Here the light falls mainly on the person and not on the dark background. The result is often a dark photo in which the light highlights (parts of) the face. You can also experiment with the opposite: a high key portrait. This is a photo without shadows and with lots of light. With both high key and low key photography, you can experiment a lot with light to see what effect it has on the photo.

7. Shoot into the light

Photographing a portrait against the light is a bit trickier, because your model’s face quickly becomes darker. Still, we’d love to challenge you to give it a try. For example, you can photograph a silhouette. Fewer details are visible, but if the background is a sunset, for instance, that’s not necessarily a problem. You can also make the backlight work in your favour by using a reflector. When shooting into the light, lens flare may occur, and you can use that to your advantage too. These flares, which look like coloured orbs, can be a great element in your portrait. Give it a try!

8. Edit your photos

Sometimes you want to keep your portrait as natural as possible, but you can also get creative with post-processing. For example, you can photoshop portraits of several people together, or have a landscape appear within the silhouette of a portrait. If you can imagine it, you can edit it.

Ready to try it yourself?

Ready to try it yourself?

With this video we want to challenge you to work with light in your portrait photos. Experiment with your camera settings, light and surroundings. In this video we use light in three different ways. Will you give it a go too?

Share your result

Have you shot a beautiful portrait too? Share your photo with us for a chance to be featured on our Instagram account. Use the hashtag #KameraExpress or tag Kamera Express in your post. And don’t forget to follow us for plenty of inspiration.