77 photography techniques, tips and tricks for taking pictures of anything

Learn new photography techniques – and master old ones – with this essential photographer’s resource. This list of 77 photography techniques to try covers some of the most popular types of photography.

Whether you want to improve your portrait photography or learn how to take better landscapes, discover the secret to sharp close-up photos or start out in street photography, you’ll find some essential tips and tricks here.

Words by Marcus Hawkins

Portrait photography techniques, tips and tricks

Improve your photos of people with our quick and easy camera techniques

Portrait photography technique 01: focus on the eyes
While eye contact is not always desirable in a portrait, sharp eyes certainly are. Manually select an AF point that’s positioned over one of your model’s eyes, or use the central focus point to lock focus on their eye.

Then, with the shutter release half-pressed to keep the setting locked, recompose your picture before taking the shot.

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Portrait photography technique 02: using a standard or telephoto lens
Wide-angle lenses are a great choice for photographing environmental portraits, where you want to show a person within a specific context. However, wide-angle lenses used close-up will distort facial features and creative unflattering pictures.

A better choice for portraits is either a standard lens or a short telephoto lens. The classic portrait focal lengths for a full-frame camera are 50mm, 85mm prime lenses and a 70-200mm zoom.

These will help to compress features and provide a more natural-looking result.

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Portrait photography technique 03: use Aperture Priority mode
Aperture Priority gives you direct control over the aperture, and as a result the depth of field (DOF).

Fast prime lenses, such as 50mm f/1.4 and 85mm f/1.2 enable you to choose very large apertures for a shallow depth of field. This can help you create those creamy-smooth, out of focus backgrounds that give portraits a professional quality.

Working with such a narrow band of sharpness means that you need to be accurate with focusing – the entire portrait will look soft if you don’t focus accurately on the eyes.

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Image by Pete Travers

Portrait photography technique 04: using window light
You don’t need an expensive home studio lighting kit to take amazing portraits – a window and a reflector can help you achieve stunning natural results without spending too much.

Position your model at an angle to the window and use a white or silver reflector to open up any shadows across their face. A silver reflector will give a crisper quality of light than a white one, although the effect won’t be as subtle.

Be aware of any colour casts that may be introduced by features on the other side of the glass  as well – a lush green lawn can give skin tones a sickly quality, while late evening sunlight on a patio will reflect lots of warm light.

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Portrait photography technique 05: high-key portraits
Deliberately choosing to over-expose a photo to create a ‘high-key’ effect results in a light and delicate look that can enhance feminine portraits and pictures of children.

The trick is not to blow the highlights in-camera, but rather brighten up the shot later in software such as Photoshop.

Shooting RAW files will give you the most editing head-room, as you’ll be able to extract more detail across the tonal range in raw compared to JPEGs.

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Portrait photography technique 06: baby portraits
When it comes to lighting baby portraits, natural light is the best choice. Flash will just end up spooking them. Try and position them near to a window and use a reflector to bounce light into any shadows.

The more light you can get onto your subject, the lower ISO sensitivity you can use for the best quality photos.

To catch a baby at their best, photograph them just after a feed or when they’ve woken up first thing in the morning.

They’ll be more active and alert than at other times of the day, and you’re more likely to get the kind of cooing baby portraits that parents will love.

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Portrait photography technique 07: photographing children
Taking photos of children is fun but challenging. Keep a kids’ portrait session short and entertaining. Play games with them: ask them of they can see their reflection in the front element of the lens is a good way to get some eye contact.

Fit a wide-angle lens and shoot without looking, poking the camera into their face. Get them used to the shutter sound and not having to look down the lens and smile.

Make the most of opportunities when they’re still for a moment, such as when they’re concentrating on a toy. Chat to them as you would with adults and once you’ve taken a few photos show them the results on the LCD screen, so that they feel involved.

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Portrait photography technique 08: shooting in burst mode
Whether you’re taking a child’s portrait or a group portrait, set your camera in its fastest drive setting. You don’t need to machine gun the shutter release, but shooting in short bursts will ensure you capture a fleeting range of expressions.

It also improves your chances of getting a shot where everyone’s eyes are open in a group portrait.

Even if you don’t capture everyone’s eyes open or their beaming smiles, having a range of shots taken fractions of a second apart means you can easily swap faces in Photoshop.

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Portrait photography technique 09: posing group portraits
When you’re arranging a group portrait, the first thing you’ll probably consider is height, putting taller people at the back and shorter people at the front.

However, keep a close eye on clothing too. It’s easy to miss clashing colours while you’re focusing on everyone’s height, and that will be more noticeable in the final picture.

To ensure everyone appears sharp, you need to use an aperture of at least f/8 with a wide-angle lens. But if you’re taking an indoor group portrait, you’ll need to use a high ISO in order to shoot at that aperture and get sharp handheld photos.

Photos may end up full of noise, and even then the shutter speed may not be fast enough for sharp images. A trick here is to arrange everyone in a line along the same focal plane, then the aperture doesn’t have to be so narrow.

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Portrait photography technique 10: family photo posing ideas
Think about how your arrangement of people in a group family portrait can tell a story about the relationship between the different members.

A simple idea is to place the emphasis on the patriarch or matriarch of the family, or the newest arrival. By grouping the rest of the family around them, you’ll be able to create a clear focal point.

For larger family group photos, use furniture – whether that’s a sofa for indoor shots or a gate for outdoor portraits – to break the group up. Sit the children in front of it and have the adults standing behind it.

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Portrait photography technique 11: candlelight portraits
When you’re taking photos by candlelight, you’ll need to push the ISO to 1600 and beyond and work with large apertures if you’re to get a fast enough shutter speed to freeze any motion in your model, the camera or the candle flames.

Turn your camera’s flash off and use Manual exposure mode. Switch off any lights, take a meter reading from your portrait-sitter’s face and let the rest of the room slip into darkness.

If you’re planning a candlelit portrait shoot, use more than one candle. Not only will it increase the amount of light available to make the exposure, but it will allow you to spread the illumination for softer shadows.

Landscape photography techniques, tips and tricks

A collection of smart outdoor photo techniques for beginners and beyond

Landscape photography technique 01: using ND grads, strong Neutral Density filters and polarisers
Landscape photographers often carry a range of filters to help them solve exposure problems or achieve an effect that’s difficult to recreate in photo editing software.

Although HDR photography and exposure blending in Photoshop have reduced the need for ND grads in the field, solid ND filters and polarising filters still have their place in the landscape pro’s camera bag.

Solid Neutral Density filters reduce the amount of light entering the lens, extending shutter speeds for long-exposure landscape photography.

Polariser filterss remove reflections from the surface of water and shiny leaves, and boost the contrast between blue skies and white clouds.

Both of these effects are tough to pull off authentically in Photoshop. They’re also more fun to do in-camera…

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Landscape photography technique 02: level horizons
Most of the time you’ll want the horizon in a picture to be level. This is especially true if you’re shooting seascapes, otherwise the water will appear to be running out of the frame.

Your camera’s Live View screen has a grid overlay that can be activated in the menu to ensure horizons are level, and it may also have an electronic level display that can be superimposed over the image.

If your camera lacks these features, use the rows of autofocus points you can see in the viewfinder as a rough guide to keeping the horizon straight.

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Landscape photography technique 03: hyperfocal focusing technique
Depth of field is an important consideration when photographing landscapes. It’s often desirable to get as much of a view – from foreground details to the distant horizon – to appear as sharp as possible.

To increase the depth of field, choose smaller apertures and then manually focus at the hyperfocal distance. This is the point at which the depth of field will stretch from approximately half the hyperfocal distance to infinity.

The hyperfocal distance changes according to the focal length and aperture being used, so we’d advise using one of the many useful hyperfocal smartphone apps available to do the calculations for you.

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Landscape photography technique 04: long lens landscapes
It’s instinctive to reach for a wide-angle lens when photographing landscapes, but a telephoto lens is also an essential part of the creative landscape photographer’s camera kit.

A telephoto lens enables you to compress the elements of a scene, making the foreground and background appear closer together than in a photo taken with an ultra-wide lens.

Zoom in with a long lens and mountain ranges will seem more tightly packed, trees in a forests more densely populated.

Telephoto lenses can also make it easier to compose landscape photos as they capture a narrower angle of view compared to wide-angle lenses. Being able to simplify a scenic often makes for stronger pictures.

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Landscape photography technique 05: HDR landscape photos
High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography enables you to capture detail in all areas of a picture – from shadows through to highlights – that you normally couldn’t squeeze into a single picture.

HDR photography essentially involves taking a number of photos at different exposures – either manually or using your DSLR’s autoexposure bracketing function – and then blending the best bits of each exposure into a single image.

Enthusiast and semi-pro DSLRs like the Canon EOS 5D Mark III and the Nikon D800 have built-in HDR photography modes that do the blending for you in-camera. However, for more control and flexibility, do it later in specialist software like HDRsoft’s Photomatix.

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Landscape photography technique 06: long-exposure landscapes
Using a long exposure to photograph a landscape will cause any moving elements to be recorded as motion blur.

Waterfalls, waves and trees on windy days will all add interesting movement to landscape photos if you use a shutter speed of several seconds to photograph them.

Getting a slow enough exposure usually requires a small aperture, low ISO and low light. However, you can also achieve this in bright daylight by attaching a Neutral Density filter to the lens.

ND filters come in a range of strengths, each blocking the amount of light that enters the lens by a different amount.

Strong ND filters, such as the Lee Filters Big Stopper, will allow you to use extremely long exposures on even the brightest days, creating long exposure photos that stretch for many minutes rather than being over in seconds.

A 10-stop ND filter like the Big Stopper or the B+W ND110 can enable you to turn a crashing sea into a milk-smooth millpond.

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Landscape photography technique 07: tilt-shift landscapes
Tilt-shift photography enables you to combine the sharpness of large lens apertures with the extensive depth of field you normally associate with small apertures.

This is achieved by using a tilt-shift lens, which can be both tilted (to control the plane of focus) and shifted (to correct any converging verticals).

However, by tilting the lens to give an ultra-shallow plane of focus and, you can make landscapes look like miniature models.

The most convincing tilt-shift landscapes combine an element of hardware (trains, boats, cars) and a raised shooting position to mimic the view of looking down at toys on a bedroom floor.

Tilt-shift lenses are expensive though, so why not create a fake tilt-shift miniature photo in Photoshop? The results can be just as effective.

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Landscape photography technique 08: black and white landscapes
If you want to take great black and white landscape photos, shoot in colour. By using your digital camera’s raw picture quality setting rather than JPEG, you’ll record a colour image that you can convert to black and white later in photo editing software such as Lightroom or Photoshop.

Doing it this way means that you have full control over the black and white conversion, such as using dodging and burning techniques to make specific areas of the photo brighter or darker,split-toning the image or adding a colour-popping effect.

Even though you’re shooting in raw format, select the Monochrome picture style on your DSLR. This will give you a useful black and white preview of the image on the rear screen, even though you’re recording a colour image.

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Landscape photography technique 09: panoramas
Instead of using an ultra-wide angle lens to try and squeeze an entire view into a single frame, why not try shooting a panoramic landscape photo instead?

To build a panorama, first take a series of overlapping shots with the camera positioned vertically – this will give you much larger panoramic image than if you use the camera horizontally.

Although specialist panoramic tripod heads are available, they’re not always necessary, particularly if you’re using software that stitches a panorama automatically. The latest version of Photoshop’s Photomerge app is particularly adept at this process.

When you take the pictures that will be combined to make the panorama, use manual settings – manual exposure, manual focus and a manual white balance preset – to ensure consistency across every picture.

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Landscape photography technique 10: infrared photos
Although you can create a fake infrared effect in Photoshop, nothing beats the thrill of doing it in-camera. Infrared landscapes can be in black or white or colour, with both offering a very different look and feel.

For the best photos, it’s worth considering getting an old DSLR converted to infrared. You won’t be able to use it for regular colour photography once the IR conversion has been carried out, but it’s much more convenient than having to mess around with IR filters on an unconverted camera.

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Landscape photography technique 11: minimalist landscapes
Usually black and white, often square and frequently realised with the help of Neutral Density filters, minimalist landscape photographs are more about what you leave out than what you leave in.

Telephoto zooms will help you to frame interesting details that would make for a great minimalist landscape. Look for single trees, lone clouds and isolated rocks. Fog, snow and featureless skies will provide a suitable blank canvas for this type of picture too.

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