What makes an outstanding portrait photograph?

Portrait Photography Definition: There are many ingredients behind the making of a top-quality portrait photograph.  Some of these are technical like light, equipment such as the camera, lenses, and so on.  But many more of the other elements are subjective. 

A portrait photograph needs to tell a story, a story about the person, and their emotions and must make you think.  A viewer needs to be able to capture what the person in the image is thinking, at a glance, speaking without saying anything, creating an emotional tension between the viewer and the subject. 

Before photography, portraits were the preserve of painters.  The best painters interpreted their subjects.  Think of the Mona Lisa, a portrait that has captivated audiences for centuries.  We don’t even know who the sitter was for certain, but the expression is unique and makes a viewer attempt to create a connection with that work of art.

Our approach

At Robi Studio we use the same approach to the portraits we take.  After all, in the days of smartphones, technology alone would be insufficient to justify engaging a professional photographer.  Anyone can take hundreds of pictures in an instant, using clever effects and the technical end results could be qualitatively very good.

We all have thousands of photographs in our digital libraries, but which of those images are really long-lasting? Where are the tension, the emotional connectivity, and that magic that will make a picture something to treasure for years to come?  That’s why you engage a professional, and this is exactly what we strive to achieve for you, for you are unique and we want that uniqueness to shine through our photograph and to speak to you not just for a short while, but forever.

Portrait Photography Definition