How to take outstanding henna photos
Top 10 Tips for Mesmerizing Mehndi Photos
Whether you are shooting with the latest and greatest digital camera, or simply snapping with your phone, you’ll definitely want to check out these ideas for composing, lighting, and editing your henna photos. Check out the end of this post to see the gear that I personally love and use, and a shameless plug for my Henna Lounge Presets. If you enjoy the tips below and are interested in going deeper, I’d love to have you join me in February at Southern Exposure Tulum, where we will work on henna, marketing, styling, and creating epic photos for our henna portfolios.
Whenever possible, try shooting in natural light. Situate your self near a window with diffused lighting, or outside in a shady area. If shooting in the shade is not an option, try waiting until “golden hour” when the sun is lower in the sky and not casting harsh shadows. If none of these options are available, you can use a table lamp or professional light such as a ring light to illuminate your subject.
That golden hour glow!
2. Minimize distractions and clutter in your photos. It may seem obvious, but remove items that are not relevant to the scene, such as as paper towels, food leftovers, electronic devices or wires, and try to avoid eyesores such as wall outlets, light-switches, or disorganized backgrounds. Instead, use objects, accessories or textures to enhance the mood.
Natural materials and dappled sunlight create a late-summer mood.
3. Remove your subject from the background. Take your image from 2 dimensions to 3 dimensions, and showcase the design in a “habitat”, whether that’s a beautiful garden, a Bohemian lounge area, a rustic rural scene, or inspiring natural setting, get that hand or foot off the pillow or paper towel, stat! Is there a way to make the henna design relate to the environment in some way, such as a repeating shape or color theme? Something as simple as nail polish can tie a scene together!
That feeling when your toes match the ocean.
4. Boost your bokeh. What is bokeh? Bokeh is the blur that occurs when using a lens with shallow depth of field. When the aperture of your camera is wide open (gathering more light), it results in a more shallow depth of field, meaning that only a small area of the image is in focus. This is fantastic for isolating your subject from the background. There are a couple of reasons you might want to do this, including blurring out your dirty laundry in the background, or to create a magical mood with soft background textures or fairy lights. Foreground bokeh can also create a beautiful effect. A phone in “portrait mode” digitally tries to recreate this effect, but it’s not quite the same as having a good camera lens.
Fairylights in the background create a soft, magical glow.
5. Take a load off. Flatter the feet by having your model sit, and dangle their feet or barely touch their feet to the floor. This prevents the dreaded “toe squish” and “cankles” and creates a a weightless feeling. If you or your model have visible veins, which can happen if you sit still for too long, try elevating the feet for a few minutes. Simply lay on your back with your legs up a wall to help de-puff and de-vein.
Tippy toes!
6. Take action. Create a sense of movement or activity in your image. Instead of standing still feeling awkward, give yourself or your model something to do, to avoid a stiff and static pose. Walking, interacting with the environment or objects in the environment would be a good start.
Walk this way.
7. You’ve been framed! Have your model create a frame with their hands around their face, mouth, or eyes, but be sure to have them maintain a comfortable arm and hand position. Keep elbows at or below shoulder height, and shoulders relaxed.
8. Tell a tale. Consider what your “story” is. Whether it’s a fairytale wedding, a funky festival, or a come-hither mermaid fantasy, style and shoot to inspire the imagination. A few props, in this case a mermaid tail, can really take your image to the next level.
Mermaid tails tell magical tales!
9. The Edit. I’d like to devote a whole separate blog post to this topic (and I will), but for now, I’m going to keep it simple. If you use your photos straight out of camera/phone with no edits, that’s the modern-day equivalent of letting the pharmacy develop your roll of film, and chances are that your photos look nothing like what you saw in person. Editing has always been an essential component of photography, and working in the darkroom involves color and contrast filters, papers with different sensitivities, chemicals, and toners for creating different effects, and “dodging and burning” tools which help brighten up or darken improperly exposed areas. Luckily, today we can do all of that with fantastic, intuitive software such as Adobe Lightroom. Sliders to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness can help you edit your picture to look more like the scene that you saw, as well as to correct poor shooting conditions such as yellow indoor light or harsh sunlight. You can also do some light touch-ups to soften distracting blemishes.
Edit your images for that extra somethin’ somethin’.
10. Too busy to edit? If all of that sounds like a lot to manage, instead of editing each aspect of your image with the sliders, you can apply a Preset (it’s like a filter) to your image. I designed Henna Lounge Presets with henna photos specifically in mind for one-click editing. To start out, you’ll need the desktop version of Adobe Lightroom and the free mobile app. You can download a free trial of the desktop version if you don’t want to subscribe. Once you install your Presets there, then you simply sync to your mobile app, and the Presets will be imported. Even if you don’t continue your desktop subscription, the Presets will remain in your Lightroom Mobile app, and you can edit with one click any time you like.
My Personal Camera Gear
The links below are hosted by Amazon. If you purchase through one of these links, I do receive a small commission (at no additional cost to you), which helps enable me to continue to create tutorials and other free content for you. Thanks in advance for your support!
Camera Body - I love a compact camera body I can throw in my purse
Travel Tripod - Perfect for long-exposures, night-time photography, and “advanced selfies”. Light enough to bring everywhere.
“Nifty Fifty” - A lens that sees the world similar to the human eye. If I could only keep one lens, this would be it.
Affordable Nifty Fifty - A more economical option of the above.
Compact Portrait Lens - Affordable portrait lens, many of my henna close-ups and portraits were taken with this one
Medium Tele/Portrait - Super sharp and fast outdoor portrait, “lite” wildlife, medium telephoto. I also used this for my comet photos.
Fish-eye - This is my “luxury” fun lens, for super wide angles, special effects, and night-time photos.
My basic set-up. I expect this configuration to last me at least another 5 years.