Outdoor, Urban and Street Portraits

Portraits made outside the studio, from parks and backstreets to strangers met on the pavement. The first half covers camera settings, light and locations for outdoor and environmental portraits, including fashion shoots on location. The second half moves into the city: urban portrait techniques, how to approach strangers and ask for a picture, and a long real-time street portrait session in Sweden.

5 Techniques to Level Up Your Street Portraits

Pye Jirsa photographs strangers in Pasadena and Santa Monica, sharing compositional fallbacks for portraits made in two minutes: staircases as posing objects and leading lines, the strip of sky between buildings acting as a giant strip box, and one friend framing another's face at f/1.4 on a 50mm.

How to Shoot Urban Portraits

Andrew Boey photographs singer Vanessa Syt in an indoor urban setting, showing his mistakes before fixing them: switching white balance to tungsten and adjusting the amber-blue-green-magenta shift, balancing colour with an on-camera flash in manual, posing against repeating patterns beside an escalator, then moving to off-camera flash.