Faces of the world - Top places for people photography

Where to be? How to approach people? How to describe their lives? Which photographer are you - Documentary or art photographer? Which lens to use when?

Today I'm starting new serious of articles, tutorials and essay about people photography. Based on my experience, what are the best places to photograph people? To present and discuss what are the main challenges in people photography? How best to bring the culture and the social/geographical environment into the frame? We will discuss also technical issues, such as what lens to use and when? And much more pictures from all over the world – great people in amazing places.



People photography's challenges

There are several main challenges in that kind of activity.
• What do you want to describe? Personality? Emotions? Culture? Environment? Etc. The way you might answer these and other questions, will change the way you take the specific picture. For example: if this classic frame of portrait with focus on the faces and their characteristic, you might choose the following options: take the photo in portrait and not in landscape mode (obvious, no?). You might choose prime portrait lens for example my canon 50mm F/1.2. (There are much more cheaper lenses which are also vey good – the 50mm but with the F/1.4 from the same manufacturer, Canon, is very good lens and lot of people might the ROI of this lens is much better than the former one).

• Another option is to bring into the frame, the subject's environment. In order to do so you might choose wide angle lens like the Canon 16-35 F/2.8. You have to be carful, because this lens twist in the corner and most of the people don't like the effect. When you locate your subject on the corner of the frame, use 24m"m and above. The thumb rule is that your subject fills at least 30 percent of the frame's foreground and the environment, as background, fills 50% to 66% of the frame. Another advantage of this lens is that it depth of field is very deep due to the wide angle. So your foreground and background will be in focus almost all the way.