Portrait photography, or portraiture, is a type of photography aimed toward capturing the personality of a person or group of people by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses. A portrait photograph may be artistic or clinical. Portraits play a significant role in fashion and editorial photography. And you’ll find portraits everywhere, from photojournalism to wedding photography. Portraits and portraiture started out as paintings. Usually, these types of portraits were done to show power, status, and nobility and were typically reserved for the wealthy.

What sets product photography apart? Creating high-quality product photos is no simple feat. Professional product photography is the commercial form of still life photography. Learning how to style products, set up lighting, and composite different exposures takes time. Explore how we can create simple product-only photos for your e-commerce purposes and complex lifestyle photos.   

Lifestyle photography is a genre of photography that mainly aims to capture portraits of people in situations, real-life events, or milestones in an artistic manner. The primary goal is to tell stories about people's lives or to inspire people at different times. Thus, it covers multidisciplinary types of photography together.

Even though lifestyle photography is about telling a story and documenting the subject's natural environment, lighting and posing still plays a huge factor. Lifestyle photography is "posed" in an informal way such that the photographer gives some prompts and then documents the natural responses and candid moments that follow. Most lifestyle photographers prefer to position their subjects strategically in natural lighting for a “real-life” effect, but some often use external lighting as well in a manner that looks as if its eras pre-existing in the environment.

Children are both photogenic and notoriously difficult to photograph. During a posed photo shoot, they can sometimes be shy or behave differently than usual, making the portraits seem ‘set up’ or inauthentic, or at least hard to shoot.

That’s why some families choose to have a lifestyle photo shoot instead, aiming for candid rather than posed shots. Getting a great candid portrait of a child can be challenging, but if you succeed, that photo may be treasured for years.