“There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” -Robert Frank. When it comes to photography, there is one thing that is certain: raw emotion always defeats an act. This rule mainly pertains to photos where people are the subject. Many things play into taking a good photo of a person,  lighting, position, setting, point of view, and more, but one of the most important things that needs to be captured is emotion. 

Capturing emotion isn’t something that is thought of when taking photos, nor is it taught in a classroom setting, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Some quick and easy ways to capture a person’s raw emotion is to tell a little joke and wait for them to laugh, or tell them to do something abnormal for the photo and see if you can get a reaction, or, you could even pretend like you aren’t taking the picture yet and see what they do. If you want to get more into depth, you may try monitoring the person’s behavior, or seeing what interests them, or triggers certain emotions.