Photographing People: Environmental Portraits

Family Portrait at Golden Gate Bridge

Is there any doubt about where we are?  On this very special outing with my family, I wanted a photograph of our day that was a portrait, but not a close-up, and that would be a good memory of where we were and what we were doing. Isn’t that what most of us want when we are traveling with friends and family.

In order to show off both the place and the people, the people need to be slightly to one side of the frame or the other, filling either one-third or two-thirds of the frame, but not dead-center, and not tiny dots in the foreground of a vast landscape.  In this shot, I placed them on the left side of the frame to accentuate the Golden Gate Bridge, which we had come to see and to walk.  The bridge angles off into the background, providing a dynamic line in the frame and making very clear what we were about to do.  I had to be sure no elements of the bridge were “attached” to someone’s head, and so I shifted slightly so the center tower was placed off the center of the heads on the right.

In a brief few minutes, we had a great photographic memory of our day in San Francisco.