Portrait Photographer's Handbook by Bill Hurter

Combining time-tested practices with contemporary methods, this guidebook details the fine art of capturing formal and casual posed images. With advice and guidance from the finest and most decorated portrait and wedding photographers in the country, this instructional discusses subjects such as lighting in the studio and on location, improving improvisational shooting techniques, and how to retouch images in the post-production process to create truly flawless looks. A chapter addressing the common problems in taking portraitures—from working with subjects with glasses to subjects that vary in size, facial features, and skin tone—is also included.
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #5195 in Books
Published on: 2007-08-01
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
128 pages
Editorial Reviews

Review
"This guide offers excellent advice on how to master the complex art of portrait photography." —Shutterbug

About the Author
Bill Hurter is the editor of Rangefinder and the author of more than 12 photography books, including The Best of Wedding Photojournalism, Group Portrait Photography Handbook, and The Portrait Photographer’s Guide to Posing. He lives in West Covina, California.
Customer Reviews

excellent overview
Overall, an excellent introduction to portrait photography, including tips for DSLRs, lighting, and post-photo editing. My only suggestion would be for it to include more illustrative bad/problematic pictures, along with the successful/correct versions, to help with debugging problems.

Great pictures and tips in this book...
I have purchased many photography books from Amazon in the past several months. Unfortunately, while the advice in most of them useful, the sample pictures are often very poorly done, lack variety or real inspiration. This book, however, is full of gorgeous portraitures that clearly demonstrate poses, lighting techniques, etc., while still being very nice to look at. The author gives shot details in the caption of each photo, and there is a very nice range of different styles and techniques that have given me a lot of ideas on what I'd like to shoot for myself. The text itself is clearly written and the inclusion of illustrated diagrams really helps visualize proper set ups for lighting.

The only caveat is that there are some glaring editing/layout problems in the introduction. The first page includes a couple paragraphs of the introduction, and the page it's supposed to continue onto starts the entire introduction over again. It took me a minute to figure out what was going on! But other than that, excellent book, wonderful and useful pictures, clearly written text, gorgeously laid out. I definitely recommend it.

Excellent overview of portrait photography
My good friend Bill Hurter has done it again. The third edition of The Portrait Photographer's Handbook is loaded with information and beautiful images from some of the best portrait artists in the world. Bill has acquired an incredible wealth of knowledge about photography over the years and gently guides the reader through what could easily be an overwhelming amount of information. He has chosen some absolutely gorgeous photographs to illustrate his points and, rather than lecturing his readers, it is as if he were sitting with you talking over each point. Bill took on a difficult task: he had to create a book that would cover essential components of posing, studio lighting, outdoor lighting, basics of exposure in the digital world, corrective techniques and some very useful Photoshop retouching techniques. The concern would be that each topic would not be handled with enough depth to make it a worthwhile read. The result is quite the contrary: beginners and advanced amateurs who are looking to venture into professional portraiture will have PLENTY to chew on here...and once they have done their homework and PRACTICED, will be ready to tackle books that take a more in-depth look at each of his topics. There were also some valuable tips for old dogs like me! One note of minor concern: there seems to have been a glitch in the introduction. The intro starts twice on two pages and there seems to be an unfinished thought in the same section. Don't let this bother you--go read, learn, shoot and learn some more.