Portrait Photography in the Era of Digital Photography

Portrait Photography has been opened up more experimental opportunities with the penetration of Digital Camera due to a big factor – the cost reduction of Film. It is not that, the pricing of camera, Lens and other setup has increased too much. Although it is undeniable fact that, a DSLR with is equivalent to a professional level Film SLR costs a huge. Still, photography never means equipment. So as, Portrait Photography can be more experimented by a photographer in this era of Digital Photography.

Brief details on Portrait Photography

Portrait Photography is a genre where a range of artistic initiatives revolves around the idea of showing the physical or emotional mood of the person or persons through the photos.  Portrait Photography is not only important for personal collection or as a part of family album, Portrait Photography is needed in official documentations including print media press releases, author bibliography etc.

Mostly a Candid Portrait Photograph is considered the standard of a good Portrait Photography of a person. Before Digital Photography penetrated en mass,  Portrait Photography was equivalent to either a facial photograph taken inside a studio setup or taken by a professional. But with the technology, as the chance of experimentation has been increased, Portrait Photography has itself taken a sharp bend towards being more artistic.

Portrait Photography and Digital Photography

Hit-or-miss chance for adding optical artistic effect like bokeh effect was present specially in outdoor or so called social Portrait Photography, even by a professional. The reasons are simple, with a small viewfinder, it was difficult to estimate a very small area in the background. Development from Negative Film to an image took few hours with own setup, which was in the later phase mostly replaced by digital reproduction of images and needed bigger machines.

Specially with the introduction of low cost Prime Lens yet acceptable reproducibility, like Canon EF 50mm f/1.8, made a big change in Portrait Photography. This factors are quite apparent if one searches in any Photo Art or related websites like deviant Art or Flickr.

With time, the once most important requirement of Portrait Photography, a soft focus lens, has been reduced due to very good quality image editors like Adobe Photoshop.