Portrait photographer tips
Hello, dear readers of the Medium! My name is Zaman lashari, I am a portrait photographer. I have been shooting for 3 years and today I will try to tell you to step by step about my work process from start to finish.
LOCATIONS IN PORTRAIT PHOTOS
First of all, I start by choosing an interesting location. When looking for places to shoot, I have one principle to shoot in places where none of the local photographers has ever filmed before. This is a very important point in the foundation of my photography because this approach perfectly distinguishes the local bombers from the crowd, who take turns photographing at hackneyed locations.
During the search phase, I ride around the city a lot, personally looking for unusual places. I will share a life hack for finding interesting places — if you, like me, have to go to another city, use the Google Street View mobile application. A preliminary virtual walk around the city makes it much easier to find a place to shoot.
MODELS
As soon as an interesting location is found, I start looking for a model. At this stage of work, be especially careful about the choice, so
like this 90% successful portrait photography.
Now everything is simple for me — I make announcements on social networks about finding a girl, and people themselves write to me, all that remains is to choose the most catchy appearance.
But this was not always the case, and from my own experience, I know how, at first in photography, beginners have a lot of refusals when they offer shooting due to the lack of at least some kind of portfolio.
Here I can give only one piece of advice to aspiring photographers: do not be afraid to write to people first. They don’t take money for demand, therefore, as soon as
if you see a person you would like to shoot, write to him right away.
TECHNIQUE
Now I’ll tell you a little about my technique. In my portfolio, almost everything was shot with crop: Canon 60D plus Sigma 30 mm f / 1.4 lens. I worked with this set for two years, but over time I ran into the ceiling of this camera’s capabilities and switched to a higher level set, namely: Canon 6D plus Sigma 35 mm. This setup suits me completely and I don’t plan to change it to something else yet.
SHOOTING A PORTRAIT
Looking at my work, you will notice that almost all of them were shot in natural light at different times of the day, from dawn to dusk, and in general, I am not categorical in the choice of shooting time. I set the camera settings as follows: aperture — f / 1.4, white balance — auto, shutter speed — according to the situation.
I always shoot a series of portraits, so I keep in my head the idea that it is necessary to change the planning of the frame more often: close-up, medium, general. This technique helps to diversify your shots, and the series will look much more varied.
SELECTION OF MATERIAL
First of all, I go through all the frames, along the way marking interesting photos with “stars” in Lightroom. After the first stage of sorting, about 20–30 photos may remain. Then I go through the already selected images, selecting from them the top ten in poses/angle/light/emotions, and work only with them. The rest goes to the basket, because the best is the smallest, but of higher quality. I try not to fill my portfolio with almost identical frames, uploading 40 photos from one photoset, and I advise you not to do this.
TREATMENT
The first thing I do is drop in the colour in Lightroom. When I was just starting out, I liked to add ready-made presets to my photos, but for two years now I have not done this, because each shooting is unique in place, time and image of the model and the technique with template processing no longer suits me.
After colour correction, I finalize the photos in Photoshop, tweak the colour if necessary and do retouching. I retouch in a fairly popular way: first I remove large imperfections of the skin with a patch, and then I use Dodge and Burn. Remember that moles and birthmarks are not defects, do not remove them, do not deprive the model of its uniqueness.
From my favourite editing tools in Photoshop I can highlight Channel mixer and Color correction. I use this pair of tools to process each of my images. Next, for posting on social networks, I reduce the size of the photo and increase the sharpness.
So I described to you the whole process of my work.
A SMALL AFTERWORD
Do not forget that all people are different, and there is no one algorithm for constructing the perfect frame for each person. Usually, the first 15 minutes of shooting are wasted with me, because at this time I am looking for favorable angles and light for a particular person. So if at the beginning it turns out “not very” — this is normal, in 15–20 minutes everything will be beautiful!
Also, remember that you need to shoot a lot in order to stay still in photography. But in order to shoot more and more interesting each time, I recommend that you constantly be inspired by cool works and analyze the pictures that you like.
Every day I go to Behance, to the profiles of my favourite photographers and look for new lighting schemes, compositional techniques, colour combinations, camera angles, etc. Analyzing photos and making one shoot based on the data obtained is much more effective than mindlessly bombing photo sessions one by one, hoping to grow your skill.
Thank for your attention!
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