Skip to main content

Video offers 3 tips for finding portrait locations in everyday places

How to Find Portrait Locations in Unlikely Places
It’s easy to get online and find amazing pictures taken from the peak of a mountain or the base of a waterfall, and feel like the locations that you have at home and around your town are sub par. But the reality is that even in town there are beautiful portrait locations to be found.

This is the topic behind a recent video from Mango Street Lab over on YouTube. In the video, the team talks about how they approach looking for locations around town, and how they find interesting compositions even in grungy semi-scary places. This is a really important skill to have if you hope to take more interesting pictures while out and about in your hometown.

The first tip that Mango Street shares in the video has to do with paying attention to the color and texture of the scene you are shooting in. The example that they show is a wall painted an off-white color, with a green bush hanging down from it. They point out that this mixture, neutral white with the green, helps to evoke natural outdoorsy feelings from views — especially when paired with the earth tones that their model was wearing.

The second tip the team shared is not all that surprising, but has to do with lighting — more specifically, how the daylight is interacting with your scene and model. One idea they point out is to go to a nearby parking garage which will almost assuredly have some interesting light that you can use to highlight your subjects for some interesting portraits.

For the final tip, the guys at Mango Street say to look for locations that your models or subject can be interactive with. For example, the railing of a garage staircase, or a swingset at the local park. The key here is that the interactivity adds to the image and does not take away from it. Whatever your subject is doing, it should make sense.

Hopefully these tips will help you think outside of the box with your next outdoor photo session. For more fun tips like this check out the other videos that Mango Streel Lab has to offer over on their YouTube channel.

Anthony Thurston
Anthony is an internationally published photographer based in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Specializing primarily in…
Fujifilm’s successor to the wildly popular X100V has just landed
fujifilm unveils x100v successor x100vi

FUJIFILM X100VI Promotional Video/ FUJIFILM

Fujifilm has finally unveiled the successor to its super-popular X100V camera.

Read more
How to download Instagram photos for free
Instagram app running on the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5.

Instagram is amazing, and many of us use it as a record of our lives — uploading the best bits of our trips, adventures, and notable moments. But sometimes you can lose the original files of those moments, leaving the Instagram copy as the only available one . While you may be happy to leave it up there, it's a lot more convenient to have another version of it downloaded onto your phone or computer. While downloading directly from Instagram can be tricky, there are ways around it. Here are a few easy ways to download Instagram photos.

Read more
Astronaut captures stunning images of a snowy Grand Canyon
A snow-covered Grand Canyon seen from space.

In the final days of his six-month stint aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen took some time out of his science work to snap some striking photos of a snow-covered Grand Canyon.

The images were captured from the station in recent days as it orbited Earth at an altitude of around 250 miles.

Read more