How to Create Stunning Environmental Portrait Photos
I’ll show you key elements using photography from my recent travels around coastal Colombia.
I absolutely love portrait photography, particularly environmental portraits. Where regular portraits capture only the details and expression of a face, environmental portraits capture the context and surroundings of the individual(s) in the photo.
In environmental portraits, we use elements of the background to tell a story about the people in the photo, where they live, work, play, or hang out. The challenge in getting environmental portraits is to have enough background to add context to the story without going overboard. If there are too many details, we risk creating distractions rather than focusing on the story.
However, distractions are somewhat subjective to the viewer of the photo. For one person, they may find too many elements distracting. For another, they may see the many details in the photo as interesting. In the case of travel photography, details can also tell a story of the place and its people. Often, travel and environmental portraits often overlap in their definition. However, environmental portraits branch tell a much broader story than travel photos.
