I feel the image is lacking expression, emotion, connection. Sometimes, as we’re doing critiques, we’re looking at the obvious. We’re looking at lighting, we’re looking at posing. Here, I’m just struggling with the connection of our subject. Maybe that’s the goal, but these are things you want to be looking at.
All too often, when we think of noise in photography, we are thinking about our images. The truth is, noise is one of the biggest risks to our business and to our overall mental health. I am talking about the noise of the universe here.
As you cull your most recent wedding, you might be asking yourself, “When do I go black & white?” Throughout my career, I have displayed both color and black & white photos in my portfolio. I enjoy black & white images, because there’s simply something different to them.
A sales funnel is simply a conceptual representation of the path that people take from “lead” to “client.” Since literally every client was once a lead, every client came through your funnel—even if you didn’t know you had one.
Do you have an emotional connection to the landscape or subject in front of you? I’ve found that I’m most focused and successful when I’m passionate about the subject. For me, it’s landscape; for you, it could be portraits, botanicals, abstracts, or long-exposure architecture.
Black & white should be used to remove distractions from your image and help bring more focus to your subject. A black & white portrait can help focus on your subject’s emotion, as well as eliminate color patterns that take attention away from them. The key is to use black & white to help communicate your vision more efficiently than a color image would do.
When it comes to soft light, size matters! Yep, I went there. Hey, come on, who can resist a good cheesy photo joke? Not I! But seriously, its true—when you want soft light, the larger and broader the light source used, the softer the quality of the resulting light.
To re-create the classic Hollywood self-portrait, we will first analyze and reverse-engineer some portraits from that time and style. Next, we’ll choose what kind of lights and modifiers to use. Then, finally, we’ll position those lights and take the shot to see what results we get.
Dialing in color doesn’t have to be as painstaking as it seems. Remember to start with a color profile that looks closest to how you want your images to look. Then the rest will fall in place in terms of controlling brightness, tonal recovery, and white balance.
I really believe that learning to properly use a bounced flash will give you a much greater degree of freedom when you are on a shoot. In venues that allow for it, you will be instantly prepared for any lighting condition and will no longer be shackled to the off-camera flash or sent scrambling for one to mount to the camera.
In today’s competitive landscape, quality online photography training and education is priceless to your growth. Unfortunately, most publications contain a ton of fluff. No real meat to their content. Not at Behind the Shutter. We are committed to the photography community and improving professional photography by providing current, insightful, and in-depth educational content.
Training topics include photography lighting techniques, photography off-camera flash tips, photography posing guides, photography business concepts and marketing strategies, Facebook for photographers, boudoir and glamour photography training, high-school senior photography concepts, IPS (In-Person Sales) strategies, family photography, Lightroom tutorials, Photoshop how-tos, and much, much more.
