Hi, I'm Bronson Far, a commercial and portrait photographer based in New York City. In this video, we're going to dive into how best to bring out emotions and real expressions in your photography. Yeah, yeah, yeah. First part of the question, I kind of like a wrote down some news. I started with the Canon. I got my first Canon T3i. I graduated to a 7D. I also got the 7DD. And at that time in my career, I was doing a lot of guerrilla style photography, known as wedding photography. I decided to get more into commercial photography and up my game from the 7D and the 7DD to the Canon 5D Mark III. Most recently, I graduated to a mirrorless camera, the R5. With the Canon R5, I absolutely love the eye detection settings that it has. It allows me to be able to direct my subject and not worry about the focus so much. I'm talking about they can have a mask on, they can have a hair or a hand in front of their face, obscuring what you think the detection would pick up. But it is perfect every time and it's really helped with my workflow. There is certainly a duality within my work. I love to photograph loud, rembunctious, joyful, empowered people. But I also love to capture more pensive and thoughtful moments as well. Like in this photo here, you'll see that my colors are a little bit more desaturated. In the composition, I really love this photo as well. It's really all about nature, being in a public space, I love his wardrobe as well and just the way that the trees kind of make your eyes go to the subject. In this particular photo, I use a Canon 70-200 to get the compression that you see in the photo. What I mean by compression is like that bouquet or that creaminess in the background that helps the subject to really stand out. I also use a lens attachment called a star filter to get those hazy highlights that you see on all the subjects on body. Returning to themes like joy and expression, you'll find that a lot in my work and that's because I am a pretty joyous person. So in this photo, I wanted to create something that was bold, striking, that had a little bit of movement in it as well. I also wanted to highlight how beautiful the sky looked. So I used a white angle lens, a 24-70 to capture the scene and it allowed my subject to get really close to the camera as well. You can see I invoked a little bit of color theory here using reds and yellows and blues and primary colors. I used a bit of shutter drag to create that motion of the New York C's right around his ankle and hand. Creating emotional or joyous imagery doesn't always have to be through the lighting that you choose. It can also be through the wardrobe, through the props or what you decide to put in the foreground of your images. Like this one right here. This was a lifestyle shoot a few years ago and I decided to use various materials that I found on set to shoot through and that's where you get that kind of orange blur in the corner there that really helps your eye to see the entire frame. You can see that they have such great expressions and my Sigma 1.4 lens caught their great expressions so crisply. Lighting is so so important with creating a great portraiture. I think that a photograph is 90% the lighting that you use. So you'll see in my work a lot of the soft more pensive looks are either done with soft natural light or modified strobes to make look like natural light. And then you'll also see in my work some of the more striking and bold images are going to be maybe flash with a lot of shadows a lot of like everything is bright and colorful. I really love eye contact. Having your subject look directly into the camera creates such an intense sense of intimacy for me that I love having my subjects do do that. Conversely I also love them to look away from the camera and maybe I'll shoot through a doorway or through a plan giving more of a voyeuristic point of view. That's equally as emotional as someone looking directly into the camera as well. And then finally in the post processing portion of making a portrait I always pay attention to the way that my eye moves throughout the photo is it interesting to my eye do I think it's going to be interesting to my viewers and I really rely on how it makes me feel before I send it out into the world. There are a few different ways I like to get my subjects to showcase authentic emotions and it's really going to have to do with their comfortability with you. Be involved in the casting process as much as you can. There you'll be able to build a relationship of trust a background of relatedness that I really lean on when I'm directing my talent. Another great way to create an environment that is open and easily achievable of these authentic emotions is really the people that are on set with you. Your team is an extension of you. And if you want your subject to be at ease, you yourself have to be at ease you have to give that energy. So the people around me really do make a huge difference on set. And I intend my audience to get out of my photograph is a lot of empathy. Whether that is empathy towards the joyous empowered photos that they see of mine or the more pensive and thoughtful images that they see. I think that's because that's who I am as a person. Those are the two sides of my personality. I want to keep making beautiful portraiture. I want to keep telling those stories of joy and empowerment and pinciveness and thoughtfulness as well. Thanks a lot for watching. Find my work on Instagram, braunson.photo, or check me out online, braunsonfar.com. Cut.