Posing, composition and editing. The three things that stand between the picture in your head and the picture on your screen.
There is a moment on every shoot where you can see the photograph perfectly clearly and it is not yet in your camera. Craft is the distance between those two things.
It is also, happily, the part you can learn. People talk about an eye as though it arrives fully formed, a gift you either got or you didn’t. I have never believed that. Everything I know about where to put someone, where to put the frame, and what to do afterwards, I learnt slowly, by getting it wrong in front of people and then working out why. There is no silver bullet in this. There is just doing it, over and over, and paying attention while you do.
Sixty seven guides live in here, across three sections. Between them they cover the whole distance.
WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN HERE
Posing The biggest section, and the one photographers ask about most. How to pose people so it doesn’t look posed: using the way somebody already stands, working with two people of very different heights, getting a genuine smile out of a child instead of that awful gritted one, photographing couples who have never done this before, and coaxing something honest out of a subject who told you in the car park that they hate having their picture taken. Dogs, newborns, siblings, teenagers and BJJ fighters all get a look in.
Composition Where the frame goes and why. Rule of thirds and the golden spiral, and what happens when you nudge them slightly off. Cropping, viewpoint, frames within frames, and how the shapes already in a room can hold your subject in place for you.
Editing Photoshop, mostly, and retouching that still leaves a person looking like a person. Frequency separation done properly, skin without the plastic, eyes that lift without glowing, reflections out of glasses, black dogs against black backgrounds, and a few actions that will hand you an afternoon back every month.
Next Steps
Start wherever you are weakest (or with whatever intrigues you most!) That is usually the fastest way to a better set of pictures, and it is almost never the section you expected.
The Craft
Portrait Composition
Posing