Shooting a good photographic portrait is very difficult.  Capturing the mood, the emotion, the look and the connection with your subject can be tough, especially if YOU are the subject. 

Here are a couple of tips that might help get you started:

• The eyes make the portrait.  If the eyes are part of your photograph, make sure that they are IN FOCUS, this establishes the connection between the subject and the viewer.
• REMEMBER THE RULE OF THIRDS!
• A good portrait will contain at least one element that reveals the subject’s personality.
• Do your best to put your subject at ease.  Tell a joke, ask them a question, stand on your head!
• Give your subject something to hold.  Often, a simple "prop" will give your subject something to focus on and manipulate, taking them out of that "frozen at attention" pose that makes portraits boring.
• Sometimes setting your camera to do continuous shooting and having your subject tell a joke or a story can yield some great shots.
• Sometimes, the setting or the backdrop can be just as fascinating as your subject.  Try taking your subject somewhere to shoot their portrait.
• Don't just shoot "Medium Close-ups"!  Try as many interesting camera angles as you can to get a good shot! 
• Beware of harsh indoor lighting!  This tends to bring out the flaws in a person's face.  Look for soft, indirect light.
• Consider shooting at a low f-stop (2.8-3.5) in AV mode so as to blur out the background of your picture, unless the background is an integral part of the portrait.

Here is a Gallery of Portraits for Inspiration.

Here are the rules to the assignment:

1. You will be creating a portfolio of AT LEAST 15 INDIVIDUAL portraits:  10 portraits of 10 different people and 5 self-portraits. For the self-portraits, please consider using a tripod and the timed-exposure.  Please do not just have someone else take your picture, that is not in the spirit of the exercise. (Also, if you want to do some extra GROUP portraits, that is fine for your personal collection, but I do not want them for this assignment.)
2. Be creative!  Do close-up portraits, far-away portraits, dutch angle portraits, worm's eye portraits, shadow portraits, whatever is interesting to you!
3. I expect that you will probably need to take at least 100-200 photographs to find 15 that are actually worth showing to someone else.  When I do Senior Picture shots, I usually shoot 500-750 photographs to find 20 that are excellent.
4. Try to take a couple of portraits of people that you do not know, but would make interesting subjects.  I know that this is difficult, but if you approach a potential subject and say that you are working on a PORTRAIT project for a school photography class and would they mind if you took their picture, most people will allow you to do so.
5. Make sure to do Post-processing on your shots, especially if you would like to convert some of your portraits to Black and White.  Save your final portraits for your portfolio into a folder and turn them in at the end of the UNIT.