Watch your edges before you watch the face
Okay. Last lesson we built a backdrop out of stuff you already own, which I hope some of you actually tried. This lesson is about the thing that ruins more of those backdrops than anything else, and it's not the sheet wrinkling or the lighting being slightly off. It's what's happening at the edges of your frame while you're busy staring at your subject's face.
Here's the confession that started this whole habit for me. The very first "real" portrait I ever tried to take was of my son William in the backyard. I had him standing there, I was fussing with getting his expression right, I was so locked in on his face that I didn't notice the garbage can lid sitting in the frame behind his left shoulder until I got home and looked at the pictures on the computer. Every single frame. A garbage can lid, just sitting there, like a weird metallic halo. I did not notice it once while shooting because I was one hundred percent focused on him and zero percent focused on the four corners of the frame around him.
That's the mistake. You get a person in front of you, you want them to look good, so your eyes go straight to their face and stay there. Meanwhile the background is doing whatever it wants. A branch is coming out of someone's head. A telephone pole is lined up perfectly with their spine. Someone's car is parked in the corner in a color that fights with everything. None of that is visible to you in the moment because you're not looking for it. You're looking at the smile.
So the habit I want you to build, starting today, is: check your edges before you check the face. Every single time, before you press the shutter, do a quick lap around the frame with your eyes. Top edge. Right edge. Bottom edge. Left edge. Then the face. It takes about two seconds once it's a habit. It takes considerably longer to fix a garbage can lid in editing, and honestly, editing is not my strong suit anyway, so I'd much rather solve it in the moment than try to clone-stamp it out later.
The actual steps
Set the person first, then look past them. Get your subject roughly where you want them, then before you bring the camera up, physically scan the space behind them with your own eyes. Not through the viewfinder yet. Just look. Anything weird back there, move your subject a few feet, not the whole world.
Bring the camera up and do the edge lap. Same scan, now through the viewfinder or on your screen. Top, right, bottom, left, then face. If something's poking into a corner, you have two options: move your feet, or move your subject. Usually moving your feet is faster.
Watch for things growing out of heads. Poles, branches, the corner of a doorframe, a light fixture. Our eyes love to merge things that are lined up, so a pole that's actually six feet behind someone will read in the photo like it's stabbing straight out of their skull. Step a foot or two to the side and it usually clears right up.
Simplify what you can't move. If the background is busy and you can't reposition, open your aperture up if your lens allows it, or just get your subject farther from the background and closer to you. Distance from the background blurs it more than distance from you does. You don't need the expensive lens to get some separation. You need distance and a little bit of aperture, and that's available on pretty much any lens you already own.
Do a final check right before you shoot, not just once. People move. You move. The background changes as you both shift around. So the edge check isn't a one-time thing at the start, it's something you're doing every few frames, especially if anybody's walked or turned or the group has shuffled around.
When you can't control it, get what you can out of the chaos
Now, sometimes you're not shooting a clean, controlled setup. You're at a family thing, there are eleven people including three kids under six, and there is no version of that where you get eleven sets of edges checked and everybody looking calm at once. I learned this the hard way trying to organize a big group shot at a family gathering. It fell apart, completely, kids wandering off, adults half turned away, total chaos. But right in the middle of that mess I got one shot of everybody actually looking at the chaos, laughing at it, and that ended up being the favorite photo from the whole day. Nobody was posed. Nobody was checking their edges. It just worked because it was real.
So here's my actual opinion on this: control what you can control, and let the rest happen. Check your edges religiously when you're setting up a shot. But don't get so locked into the checklist that you miss the good, unplanned moment happening two feet to your left. Backgrounds ruin more portraits than bad expressions do, for sure for sure, but a great unplanned moment will forgive a slightly messy background almost every time. You're managing both at once. That's the job.
Before next time
Take five photos of anyone willing to sit still for you and do the full edge lap on every single one before you shoot. See how many garbage-can-lid moments you catch before they happen instead of after.