Home Portraits – Gear and Techniques
December 30, 2011

What’s the right gear to use for family portraits you want to create at home? Of course, the best gear you can have is a professional photographer, but suppose you want to do it yourself: what do you need? The answer depends on the kind of photograph you want to create, but there are some simple things you can do to make your home portrait come out looking great.
My quick recommendations are below; keep reading for the deeper explanation:
- SLR or Point-and-shoot camera that lets you use off-camera flash
- 1 or 2 strobes you can control from the camera
- Radio transceivers or cables to control the strobes
- Something to soften the light – white umbrellas, poster board, or even a white sheet or wall will do
- Fabric or paper with either no pattern or a neutral, subtle pattern for a background
- A happy and willing subject with plenty of time.
The first and best thing you can do – and this is required for all good pictures – is to get good subject matter. You can put a check in this block right away; your child (or spouse or pet or parent) is beautiful already. These are family portraits, and you don’t really need to do much to the people who will be in them. You can help yourself out later on, however, if you pay attention to a few things about the people:
- have your subject wear solid color clothes, preferably a color that contrasts with your subject’s face.
- Be aware of allergies, activities, and skin conditions which might cause rashes, blemishes, scratches, or other skin problems.
- Find the right time for portraits: make sure you have an hour or so in your schedule, that you’ll be undisturbed, and that your subject is not already tired.
Especially with small children, that’s not always possible, but do your best and you’ll help yourself out later.
The next most important thing about a picture, besides the subject, is the light. So you need to arrange good lighting conditions. Almost all the time this means having the main light source be something other than the flash on the camera. In the above picture, I’m using two lights – both Canon Speedlite 430EX strobes – and controlling them wirelessly using the wireless flash feature built into my EOS 7D. But an alternative is to get one strobe on an off-shoe cord, a couple strobes on wireless transceivers like the Pocket Wizard, use a couple good floor lamps, or skip the artificial light entirely and just use a nice big window in the middle of the day.
I usually like to soften the light somehow. If I have a big window providing light reflected from outside (i.e., the sun is not streaming through the window directly onto the subject) I’ll often just use that. If I’m using strobes, a softbox or umbrella helps provide a bigger, softer light source. There are tons of different kinds of equipment to choose from here. You could also decide you want the look of strong, hard shadows, and just use direct flash or direct sun. But most people don’t have this equipment lying around. A good home technique is to use a large white piece of paper – 11″ by 17″ or larger – or a big white sheet, and bounce a flash or light off of that.
You also want to provide some level of contrast between the darks and lights, but not so much contrast that the darks are just black. In the picture above, I am using two lights, both on stands with umbrellas. The light to camera right is my key light, and it is set to expose normally. The light to camera left exposes at about 2 stops dimmer, leaving the shadows intact but filling them with soft detail. This helps sculpt the look of the face.
What if you’re not using artificial light at all? Use a window for the main light, and on the other side, use a white piece of paper or a cloth to reflect some of the window light back to the subject.

Most formal portraits use a solid, shaded, or otherwise neutral background. In the first picture above I’m using a large piece of muslin fabric with a mottled gray pattern. The cloth is stretched tight over background supports. But in the picture above I’m using a blue blanket we had lying around the house. It’s draped over a background support rod and hung in such a way that it ripples in the background. There’s one light here: the indirect light coming in through the window.
If you have access to seamless paper, it makes for a simple, neutral background, like this:

Same two-light portrait setup as the first picture above, but this time with black seamless paper. Gray seamless is actually a little more versatile, but I like the way the background just disappears, with just enough detail to frame the hair.
Now that your stage is all set, it’s time to think about the camera. If you are using strobes, you need a camera that can trigger them somehow. The Canon EOS 7D features a built-in wireless (optical) flash controller for compatible Canon Speedlites, but these are expensive (camera + 2 strobes + lens for around $3,500) and not everyone wants to use an SLR. If you usually shoot with a point-and-shoot camera, it might have a hot-shoe attachment for an external flash, and you can use a radio transceiver to trigger remote flashes.
The truth is, the camera almost doesn’t matter as long as your light source works with it. You can, in fact, take fine pictures with an iPhone. But there are a couple camera choices that make a big difference for portraits.
First: use a long lens. On a point-and-shoot camera, this means backing up and zooming in. On an SLR, a zoom length of 85mm to 135mm (on either full-frame or crop-sensor cameras) will work. The idea is to back up and use the zoom to compress the nose against the face so your portrait looks more like the person and less like a strange balloon caricature of a person.
Secondly, use a wide aperture. You want the background to blur slightly, although you want to keep both eyes in focus (and this usually means the mouth is in focus as well). Apertures of f/5.6 and wider, down to about f/2.0, work well, as long as your light is not too strong. Narrow apertures (f/16 or f/22) will put everything in crisp focus, including those dust specs and scratches on the background. The three pictures above were taken using f/5.6, f/6.3, and f/5.6, respectively, and at 105mm, 90mm, and 135mm.