Portraiture is a very exciting – but also challenging – area of photography. Doing it well is not trivial and one cannot master it without practicing. I managed to organize my first portrait photography session a few days ago with real people not from my family. I made quite a lot of mistakes, but a few good pictures as well. Might be beneficial for beginners to read about my experiences. Here comes how the session went.

The story

Anita, the better half of an ex-colleague of mine attended a Professional Make-Up training course lead by a pro Hollywood master. She would like to build her portfolio and could use a few good pictures representing her work.

Myself, the beginner photographer, after reading a lot about photography, lighting and other related things, but practicing relatively little would like to practice portrait photography.

Judit, my ex-colleague’s sister was willing to help us in our endeavour as being our model for the pictures and the make-up. She is not a professional model and does not even want to be. Thank you very much, Judit. So we met in a park that we thought was a public place, but finally turned out to be a private property. After a few shots we were approached by a security guard who asked who we are and said that we were not allowed to take pictures there if we were doing that for commercial purposes. First I was trying to make a joke pointing my camera towards him that made him angry and resulted him to report the case immediately to the Chief. Then I realized that I made a mistake and explained to him that I was just a beginner photographer (carrying though a camera with quite a big lens) and wanted to practice and we were not doing it as a business. He said that a formal permission could have been requested at no price from the office. The Chief arrived and I approached him in an open and honest way, introduced myself and told him the story. He said he’s going to make a phone call and let us know about the result. We waited 15 minutes or so and eventually we got the green light and could continue the “work”.
Learning #1: check the place and get the necessary permissions before going there.

To be honest, I did not have any concept on what to achieve or what kind of photos to make. Anita asked me what kind of make up I would like to have on Judit and I could not answer. Judit asked me where to go, how to pose, whether to stand or sit, and I did not know. I was a quite a bit embarrassed by these things. This was the first time I met the model and did not really plan the whole thing in advance.
Learning #2: Meet your model before the session, have a plan and discuss it with her/him. You are the director you are in command. This is what your model and helpers expect from you.

I took lots of things with myself. My gear with an extra speedlight and a tripod for one of the speedlights and a few card-boards for fill lighting. I could hardly carry all of them on my own. I was concentrating on setting up the whole thing, placing the speedlights and adjusting their output level. And I forget one important thing: Light of God – the natural light source. I did not even forget it, I ignored it completely. When the speedlights ready beeps came only quite a few seconds after the flashes fired I realized that I managed to burn two set of batteries within no time, using the speedlights as the main light sources. I felt myself very stupid. I felt myself even more stupid when browsing through the pictures on the PC and realizing that on many of them I created very strong shadows on my model’s face by placing the lights on the two sides of her. So my flashes were not acting as fill-lights but rather the main sources of light. Very big MISTAKE.
Learning #3: Calm down and take your time to have a look at and use the environment especially the light. Know your equipment in order that you can concentrate on more important things like composing your pictures and achieving what you planned. The gear is only helping you and does not make the photos.

Motion makes a picture live. Capturing motion is interesting and not too complicated. The shutter speed was set to 1/60 all the time during this session, because it is the default setting on my camera when using flash. And 1/60 seemed to be enough for capturing her flying hair.
Learning #4: Why not to do it even if it’s trivial and easy?

I kept shooting when the model’s make-up was being adjusted or the model was just behaving naturally. A few times I shot with disabled flashlights (that I should have done much more times). I am not a pro and I did not intend to express emotions or anything like that. I was just playing, but I really like the three pictures here. You can see that the one of them is not even sharp, but there is something in that.
Learning #5: Don’t stop shooting. The real moment might come when no one expects.

I realized only when looking at the pictures on the PC how mercy-less a good lens and 10 megapixel can be if you take close ups. All of those tiny little skin blemishes can be seen extremely clearly despite of the most carefully applied make up. Those little things otherwise would possibly be stayed completely unnoticed when looking directly into an attractive lady’s face. Since the purpose of portrait photography is – in most of the cases I suppose – not embarrassing your model with the images you take you can use the help of your favourite image editing software.
Learning #6: Your digital camera might give you very good results but not good photos.

I used two Nikon SB-800 speedlights remotely controlled by my Nikon D80. The built-in flash of the camera was disabled (in the menu of the camera) but was active to control the others. The flash acting as the main light was set to TTL most of the time and I played around a bit with the compensation values. The other flash was set sometimes to manual at around 1/16 output value and sometimes to TTL.

I was using my big lens, the 70-200mm one. It was surprising how far I had to go from my model.

The aperture was set 2.8, 4 or 4.5. I did not try other values this time. I am very satisfied with the results of the F2.8 aperture.

The shutter speed was 1/60 – as I wrote – due to the default flash setting.

VR (vibration reduction of the lens) was inactive most of time.

And I forgot to adjust, and even to check the ISO setting again. It was 100 throughout the session. I should have tried at least ISO 200 without flash light and with VR.
Learning #7: Think, man, think.