Choice of background conveys vastly different emotional response to overall image sentiment

If you're a thug, a bank robber or one of america's top wanted persons, make sure your photographer uses a seamless white background for your next portrait. It conveys open-ness, conviction, truthfulness, directness and honesty, brutal honesty. So, your next picture- with the right choice of background- ought to get you off the hook real fast. Do that next sitting with a confusing, muddy, dark or black one and you'll be stalked by the G-men forever. Or maybe a mysterious person of interest just out of the peripheral. Take a hit and the paranoia gest thicker.

Here's what I mean:

I want this young model to come to my kid's  10th birthday party! Just keep her in the well lit kitchen and things will be just fine...

Even pictures with body parts a-bare look more innocent and uncensore-able:

Now let's look at dark, mottled backgrounds and see how shady, dark and downright guilty your subject looks:

30-Life! Guilty as convicted and maybe even mildly macabre...

This guy is Lebo, an artist/cartoonist from Miami who's really known for his bright fun cartoon drawings and who's also very much like that. So, I shot him as a guilty, dark, diabolical, neoclassical-style portrait to jump against his real life style. For him and the art director, I think this rendering didn't work out, but I like the portrait anyways. I'm not gonna tell you who the girls are, solly.

So, to get shooting better pictures that emote the feelings you're looking for, using a well chosen background is a great fast way to get those sentiments into your portraits right away. Once you begin to "see" the backgrounds more as part of the total composition, you'll see how important they become and how you might ought to consider them more carefully in your next compositions.

Fun pondering and great looking!