How to Make the Most of Sunsets for Golden Hour Portraits

24. Nov. 2019
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Education, Learn
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The Golden Hour is one of the best times of the day to shoot, so allow us to inspire you with some ideas for your next sunset portrait session!

If you want to play with mood, light, and emotion in your portrait work, shooting during the Golden Hour is guaranteed to give you some great results. It’s been tried and tested by many photographers, and if you’re a budding portrait photographer, it’s your turn to have fun in the sun. With some excellent examples and tips from Imogen and Mark of the Weekly Imogen channel, you’ll surely have some ideas to work with and achieve your own portraits that make the most out of this magical time of the day.

Shooting Portraits with Weird and Wonderful Props

22. Feb. 2018
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Education, Learn
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If you plan to shoot portraits with props, you might get some ideas from this video.

Stuck in a rut with your portrait photography? Sometimes, all you need to get unstuck is doing something out of the ordinary. You can do this with some fun (or weird) props or even by trying out a different medium. If this is something that sparks your interest, this video from Weekly Imogen might give you ideas to play around and experiment with.

White vs Gold Reflectors: How They Work for Portrait Photography

If you’re a natural light portrait photographer, then I simply cannot express to you how much a reflector can help you create better portraits. They’re so incredibly versatile–being able to reflect light of certain colors into a scene or even diffuse light as you see it coming into the scene. So YouTube channel Weekly Imogen decided to put together a video to show you just how reflectors work; but not just any reflectors.

Photographing a Model During the Sunset

Model: Bec Fordyce

Sunset, otherwise known as one of the times that we have Golden Hour light, can help you create absolutely beautiful portraits. Part of this has to do with the wonderful golden light that we get while another part is due to the light being naturally softer.

The folks over at the Weekly Imogen YouTube channel created a video showing off just how beautiful the results can be. Emma, the model, works with the photographer and combines ideas that they’ve done before to create very feminine and intimate portraits–all with Emma being backlit. The video does something a bit more interesting though.

While Mark (the photographer) is recording, Emma does her usual model routine of slightly changing up the pose whenever the shutter goes off in order to give variety. During this time we have music being played over the recording. We see that Mark changes his framing often and from experience I think that the best approach here is to tell your model that you’re changing your framing and even show it to them. That way, they know what space they’re working with.

The video is after the jump.

A Debate on 50mm vs 85mm Lenses for Portraits

20. Sep. 2014
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Photography Culture
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A while ago, we did a comparison of the Canon 50mm f1.4 vs the 85mm f1.8 (due to price points) when it comes to taking portraits. Weekly Imogen recently did their own filmed portrait comparison and asked their readers which one they preferred. After a long time of gathering comments and feedback, many of the readers loved the look of the 85mm lens more. However, as some commenters state, the crew used a cropped sensor camera body–which for Canon actually renders an 80mm field of view not the 75mm as stated due to the 1.6x crop factor.

What this actually means is that a 50mm lens will give the field of view of an 80mm lens and an 85mm lens will give around 136mm to the viewer with a cropped sensor camera. Still though, the lenses will still act like their actual focal lengths–which means that an 85mm will still render a less distorted image.

The comments and feedback are an interesting back and forth debate–though many still lean more towards the 85mm. The video is after the jump.