Portraits from my Latest One to One Training Session

Over the years I've offered a small amount of training but it was only recently that I've decided to make a more concerted effort in promoting it. Since gaining my Fellowship, receiving a few awards for my portraits and joining the Bowens team I've started to really feel as though I have something worth sharing with other photographers. Basically, I want to provide the sort of training that I would have liked all those years ago when I first started out. I've taken what I've learned from various workshops, seminars, demonstrations, vasts amount of reading and extensive trial and error and put it into a concise training plan that will give anyone new or struggling with their lighting a solid foundation in lighting along with guidance and inspiration for posing and styling portraits.

Yesterday I provided a one to one training session and the portraits here are what I created to show how you can light, style and pose to create a beautiful, timeless portrait of a child.

The image above, although I took the photo, I cannot take all the credit. Ian Stacey, my attendee, brought in his stool and he had choosen to have our lovely model Chloe lean on the stool. I liked the idea so much I chose to take a few for myself to see what I could produce. This is another great example how shooting with others is a great opportunity to start to see things in a different way. Sometimes we can get in the habit of shooting a certain way and its good to change things up. For example, I often stick to shooting at F8 and take more full body shots, partly because that was what I was doing for my Fellowship panel and have since had requests for similar portraits. But here I wanted to demonstrate changing the look by switching to F2.8 which meant using the 70-200mm lense which is better suited to close ups. So this is what we created. Ian produced a fantastic image himself. I love the shallow depth of field here and the connection we have with those eyes staring so intently into the camera.

I finished off with my suitcase and books shot. By this point poor Chloe was worn out. She'd been with us for a total of nearly 4 hours (including lunch) and I think we were pushing it asking for this final setup. But we each managed to get a few good ones, albeit with a little more effort and patience on our part.

By the way, this is the same girl I used in a couple of my portraits in my Fellowship panel. Here is one of hers below so you can see how much she has grown in just over a year. She is such a lovely girl to work with. I really enjoy having her around. I even get cuddles now when she visits.

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