Beauty magazines are filled with makeup advertising, but how do they manage to make the makeup colors so vibrant and beautiful? You have maybe discovered that when you go to a party and your makeup looks nice and colorful, but when looking at the party photos the next day you notice how the camera hasn’t picked up anything almost.
So how shoot good makeup photos? Here are some guidelines:
Natural light
Go out in natural daylight and shoot, or try to shoot inside in front of a bright window, early afternoon. Use a white plain background without any distractions. Those will just destroy the illusion of clean and nice makeup.Paying more attention to light is perhaps the single most important step you can take to improve your photography. You can take breathtaking photos using natural light, but you need to understand how to use it.
Lamp for night photography
If you want to do night photography of make up, you can use a lamp that you point towards your face. Please do not use flash, because it will wash out the colors, and it will look like you don’t have that much makeup on you.
Just as important in getting good low-light or night photos is the shutter speed; how long the image sensor is exposed to light. Most manual cameras will allow you to open the shutter for at least 30 seconds, which is more than enough for most low-light images.
Low ISO settings
When it comes to ISO settings, choose the lowest one if you are in a bright room, and vice versa if you’re in a dark room and it’s dark outside. A low ISO value (e.g. 100 or 200) means low sensitivity to light. This is exactly what’s needed in bright conditions in order to avoid overly-exposed photos. A high ISO value (e.g. 800, 1600 or higher) means a high sensitivity to light.
Use fill-in-flash
If you want to use a flash, only use the fill-in-flash because it won’t come out as bright, and it will only fill in the dark areas to make it look more even. Fill flash is a photographic technique used to brighten deep shadow areas, typically outdoors on sunny days, though the technique is useful any time the background is significantly brighter than the subject of the photograph, particularly in back-lit subjects.
Low shutter speed
Begin with a low shutter speed and then see what fits best, but shoot from an S mode. Don’t forget to use the red-eye reduction function for no red eyes, you want your eye makeup to be beautiful. Slow shutter speeds allow more light into the camera sensor and are used for low-light and night photography, while fast shutter speeds help to freeze motion.
Examples of shutter speeds: 1/15 (1/15th of a second), 1/30, 1/60, 1/125. Aperture – a hole within a lens, through which light travels into the camera body.
Macro settings
A nice effect is to use the macro setting on your camera. With this you can shoot photos of your eye makeup really close-up, and make some amazing shoots. When doing macro images or close-ups, the ideal depth of field is almost always shallow, therefore the typical aperture number for macro photography is between f/5.6 and f/11.
Those small aperture values are necessary to make sure that all the details of your subject will be sharp and in focus.
