Portrait Photography How To

To say that Art Wolfe is not your typical portrait photographer is quite the understatement. With a career spanning 40 years, Wolfe brings his travels from every corner of the earth to create stunning portraits in his Human Canvas collection, honoring the traditions of Ethiopian tribal culture.

Because her intent is to get the absolute best image in-camera, Lindsey Thorne is “pretty exact when it comes to lighting and posing.” When she describes her studio, the scene of almost all her boudoir sessions, as “modest and simple,” she’s citing an advantage. “I love shooting in a smaller room because I have so much control over the light.”

For this assignment, we were looking for your best wedding, portrait, and boudoir images and while Shutterbug readers submitted many good wedding and boudoir shots, it was the portraits that really stood out. Overall, we were looking for interesting angles on these popular photography genres and we got them. We didn’t want those standard “grip and grin” group shots from your Aunt Sally’s wedding reception and we weren’t seeking cheesy boudoir images that look like they should be on the cover of a romance novel from the 1960s.

Photographing people for a living can prove intimidating for many photographers. Now add “celebrity” to that and you may find you have to step up your game several notches to stand on equal footing with your subject. You can’t afford to be intimidated and you certainly can’t afford to appear unsure of yourself or to question your decisions. You have to enter the picture with a game plan and be decisive, know which lens you’ll be using, what lights, and where to place those lights. But you also have to be prepared for the unexpected. That’s why they give these jobs to photographers such as Victoria Will.

When I’m looking at ways to do a specific task my brain often reverts to Occam’s razor. (Occam was a logician and Franciscan friar in the 14th century.) The way I interpret it, is that if there are many ways to do something the easiest and most direct method is usually correct. It’s the KIS principle and keeping it simple works best for me. Like most people, especially those of us who are self employed, there aren’t enough hours in the day, so I’m extremely concerned about workflow and just how much time each project is going to take. If I have a task, like organizing and editing my work, that I can do one way that takes an hour and another that takes 30 minutes, I’ll take the 30 minute option every time. With all that said, I’ll explain how I handle a portrait session, from the original shoot to ordering the final images. It may or may not fit your way of doing things, but just keep my buddy Occam in mind and remember there’s more to life than sitting in front of a computer.

For those of you who have never worked in medium format, trust me, there is a difference you can see and feel. It’s no wonder that photographers such as Douglas Sonders choose a medium format camera system over a DSLR for the bulk of their work. And in Sonders’s case, his workhorse camera system is Phase One.