#Portrait is the catch-all hashtag for portrait photography, which Wikipedia defines as photography “aimed toward capturing the personality of a person or group of people.” Under the tag sit studio headshots, environmental and street portraits, fashion work and smartphone shots made in Portrait mode.
Hashtags to Pair With #Portrait
| Purpose | Hashtags |
|---|---|
| Core | #Portrait, #Portraits, #PortraitPhotography |
| Look and light | #BlackAndWhitePhotography, #GoldenHour, #BokehPhotography, #FilmPhotography, #35mm |
| Genre | #FashionPhotography, #StreetPhotography, #Selfie |
| Phone and AI | #PortraitModeIPhone, #LensaAI |
Pairing the broad tag with a narrower style or genre tag tells viewers what kind of portrait the post is.
Lighting Patterns
Portrait lighting is the vocabulary photographers use in captions and tutorials under the tag. Wikipedia’s portrait photography article describes the standard setup:
| Term | What it does |
|---|---|
| Key light | The main light, “placed either to the left, right, or above” the subject, typically 30° to 60° from the camera. |
| Fill light | The secondary light, “typically placed opposite the key light” to soften shadows. |
| Back light (hair light) | “Helps separate a subject from its background.” |
| Butterfly (Paramount) lighting | A two-light pattern, often called Paramount lighting after George Hurrell’s Hollywood portraits. |
| Rembrandt lighting | ”Characterized by an illuminated triangle” under the eye on the darker side of the face; named for the Dutch painter Rembrandt, who occasionally used it. |
| High-key lighting | Produces an image “mostly free of shadows” with a background brighter than the subject, usually using all three lights. |
| Low-key lighting | Lights only part of the subject, leaving dark shadows and a background darker than the subject, usually with one light. |
Early Studio Portraits
Many conventions of the genre trace back to the limits of early cameras. According to Wikipedia, the style of early portraits “reflected the technical challenges associated with long exposure times,” and subjects were generally seated against plain backgrounds, lit by the soft light of an overhead window and whatever mirrors could reflect. The same difficulty produced “hidden mother” photography, in which a young child’s mother was hidden in the frame to calm the child and keep them still. Smiles were rare too: in the 19th and early 20th centuries, photographs seldom showed smiling people, in keeping with Victorian and Edwardian conventions. Later advances allowed shorter exposures and work outside the studio.
Portrait Mode on Phones
On October 24, 2016, Apple announced that “iOS 10.1 brings Portrait mode to iPhone 7 Plus customers starting today.” The feature used “a depth-of-field effect to keep your subjects sharp while creating a beautifully blurred background.” Apple labelled it a beta at launch. As TechCrunch explained the same day, the phone used its two lenses “to detect 9 levels of depth,” then added software blur to the background layers; users could not customize the effect. See #PortraitModeSmartphone for the wider history.