What Is Environmental Portraiture?
Last June, I published a blog about about the type of street photography called street portraiture. It splits into two sub-types: candid and posed. There is some disagreement in the street photography community about whether the posed branch qualifies as street photography. That is an argument to parse out another day.
In candid street portraiture, the subject is not aware that you are taking the picture. There is no communication between you and your subject. The purists would say that if you take your picture at the split second the subject makes eye contact, then it is not a candid portrait. That is not at all the way I think about that. In fact, my idea of success in street portraiture is to wait on it, wait on it, and snap the second that eye contact is made.
I waited for this eye contact with a man doing restoration on a pyramid in the Valley of the Kings.
There are many parallels between studio portraiture and candid street portraiture. Certainly you can take candid head shots and candid traditional portraiture, except that you use only natural lighting and there is no posing. The “intrusive” photographers among us will even use a flash, although, for sure, the outcome of an on-board flash is different than the elegant outcome of studio lighting.
Which finally gets us to environmental portraiture. I am just guessing here, but I suspect the environmental street portrait photographers are forging the path for the photographers doing studio portraits. A 2020 trend for portrait photographers, wedding photographers and even fashion photographers is taking more candid photos.
Environmental portraiture includes background. The idea is to tell a story about about who the subject is, what they do, or where they are through background information. In addition, the background can add points of compositional interest to the image. The challenge is finding the right balance between the background and the person. Too much background can change the image from a portrait into a candid photo.
The settings for environmental portraiture are fundamentally different than the settings for traditional candid portraiture. A wider focal length, even as wide as 28mm, is required to get background into the picture. In addition, instead of shooting with a wide open aperture, like f/2.8, in environmental photography you generally want to shoot with a narrow aperture, anywhere from f/5.6 to f/13. This way, the details of the background will be in focus. Because a narrow aperture lets in less light, you will likely have to shoot with a higher ISO to compensate. An ISO as high as 3200 will likely produce an image with an acceptable level of noise in most modern cameras.
In candid portraiture, the wide open aperture causes a blurred background which helps separate your subject from the background. In environmental photography you have to to good ground to figure separation so that your subject does not blend into the background. That requires using light or color to separate the subject from the in-focus background and careful attention to where your subject is placed in the scene, meaning, for example, no overlapping subjects.
Many locations lend themselves to environmental photos:
Markets
Workplaces
Festivals
Modes of Transportation
Photo by Vicki Windman. Used with permission. You can see Vicki’s Instagram gallery at @vbarn106.
Homes
Photo by Susan Schiffer. Used with permission. You can see Susan’s Instagram gallery at @susan.schiffer.
Distinctive architectural settings
Events
Finally, you have a chance of getting better environmental photos if you think about the story you want to tell. In a market, for example, I want to show relationships between customers and vendors and between vendors themselves. I want to show what is sold and how the market feels. I want to show how goods are moved.
Exercise
Have you taken any street portraits? Do you consider them environmental street portraits?