The portrait mode of the camera that includes the vast majority of high-end phones (and many mid-range) has become one of its best claims in the market. And is that in a time when we share so many photos on social networks, having a phone that makes good portraits is a pleasure.
Unfortunately, not all phones have a portrait or bokeh modes that give us such fabulous results as those of these flagships, but with a series of guidelines when executing the photo and some later editing, we can get some pretty interesting portraits. We are going to use three completely different phones and we will show you how with any of them we can make a decent portrait, at least, to upload to Instagram.
To accompany the theory we will show you several images taken with four phones of different ranges and with completely different optics. These terminals are the Nokia 8, the Alcatel 7, the iPhone 6s Plus and a very strong rival, the iPhone 8 Plus. Since the last iPhone boasts a portrait mode that should give us excellent results, we have taken the photographs with him without following the guidelines that we are going to give you next, in order to show you how necessary it is to have a good camera in between the hands is to know how to use it.
The importance of framing and of course, of light:
One of the first things that can destroy a portrait (and any photograph in reality) is a bad framing. The framing, in photography, alludes to the portion of the scene that we are going to capture, something like a stage. It does not matter if we take the photograph vertically or horizontally, the important thing is that we take a few seconds to give it a balanced frame, not cut the head of the model and that everything flows within the scene.We are not talking about the golden ratio or the rule of the thirds, but something much simpler: common sense. If we are doing a portrait we have to give prominence to the model, we can not cut parts of his face or body or portray him surrounded by objects that take away relevance within the scene.
But more important almost that the frame is light. And is that light is the essence of photography (literally) and if we do not work well with it no matter the camera or phone we have, the results can be disastrous. At the time of making portraits the ideal (unless we have study light) is natural light, but be careful with this one that can also be dangerous.
And is that if we are going to make portraits in full sunlight we should not do it in the highest hours of the day, because we run the risk of running into too dark shadows on the faces. The ideal? The days are a bit cloudy, because the clouds act as diffusers of natural light, wonderfully softening the shadows.
Of course, it goes without saying that the flash is the number one enemy of the portraits (however much they insist on integrating it in the front cameras), if there is no other we can use it and then add some editing with software (that will be our last paragraph) to counteract its effects, but ideally we should avoid as much as possible as if it were the devil.
No to zoom, yes to focus:
Another thing that we must flee from when we make portraits of the zoom. For many improvements that mobile phones have integrated, the zoom continues to make us lose quality in the final result and the only thing that we will end up with is a portrait full of noise, so let's get closer, let's play with the plans and again , let's take care of the frame.We say no to zoom but yes to focus. Ideally, we approach manually and look for what we want to focus on in the portrait, what we are interested in highlighting. In addition, the manual approach gives us the possibility to unleash our creativity, being able to play and enjoy much more to make portraits.
Pepper with a little editing:
In the previous photo, we can see the samples taken with the four different cameras and we see how, for example, the Alcatel A7 leaves us with a somewhat "sad" color reproduction. However, this and any photo is susceptible to improvement with a little editing above.In-app stores we find a lot of photo editors focused on the portrait, but sometimes have too many useless modes and give us results somewhat exaggerated. For this type of photography, I personally recommend Snapseed.
And is that this editor, besides being one of the most complete that we can find nowadays, incorporated relatively recently a complete function dedicated to portraits that allow us to highlight and soften traits and even focus on specific areas.
