Every day is different. Every client is different. Every shoot is different.
True.
But there are still consistent principles for making the very best of the time you have available during a portrait session. In this video we step through a shoot with Millie and give ideas and insights for running the session so it is efficient, creative and, just as importantly, a lot of fun!
Transcript
So no matter how much we’d love this to be the case, time is never limitless. So when you’re structuring a portrait shoot, how do you make the best of it? Because your time is valuable, your client’s time is valuable, and yet still, you want to create the widest variety of images you can. I’m Paul Wilkinson, an award-winning photographer, judge, trainer, and author of the Mastering Portrait Photography book, as well as being the host of the Mastering Portrait Photography podcast. And in this class, we’re going to walk through a real-life shoot with a real-life client and show how you plan, how you walk through an hour and a half of your time and your client’s time, and create the widest variety of beautiful images that you can, so that you feel great as a creative and your client walks away with images that they’re going to love. At the end of the class, you too should have an idea of how to shape a shoot, how to create a sense of direction, how to sense, how to give reassurance to your client, create the energy that’s necessary for them to enjoy the session and consequently love their images.
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in our studio, we’ve sent them out a little briefing pack and in there we’re going to ask for some information and we’re going to give a little bit of information. What we’re going to ask for is the style of photography they’re looking for. What’s the purpose of the images? Now I suppose in a sense it doesn’t really matter because I am the photographer I am, I have the style that I have and just like you, our clients come to us because of what we do, the way we approach each shoot and that’s absolutely correct. Every portrait photographer should have a client base that’s in tune with their imagery but nonetheless if we have a CEO of a multinational
or a manager of a hedge fund looking for LinkedIn profile shots, those images are probably going to have ever so slightly different messaging to someone who’s come to us for images on a dating website. So it’s useful for us to know sometimes people send us example pictures, sometimes people send us styling guides but more often than not it’s a description of their job and the kind of images they’re looking for. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t get asked to make the images look authentic,…