Getting Ready For the BIG Photoshoot

As you probably already know, I love playing around with photography. I am an amateur at best and plan to keep it that way forever. I don’t feel I have the eye to really do professional work and really prefer the “street photography” genre the best. It’s one that allows me to hide behind the lens and be anonymous. I have done some portrait photography, mainly some of my children’s high school senior photos, and have reluctantly agreed to do some portraits for non-family members.

Portrait photography scares me because there’s a lot more on the line. When shooting portraits, there is a lot more interaction with the photographer and the expectation is that the photographer will guide the “model” on appropriate posing techniques. Also, lighting is much more important depending on the location of the shoot and in my case most recently that has been outside. In order to shoot outside, I find that I often times want to incorporate an off-camera flash which adds a whole other level of complexity to the technique, not to mention that I usually will need an assistant to hold my flash for me.

Some good friends of ours asked me if I would take their son’s high school senior pictures and I agreed to do it but was very nervous about it from the start. I haven’t had a lot of time to work with people on posing techniques and I also wasn’t sure where to take the pictures in order to make them look like I wanted. I did a lot of research on posing and also spent a couple of weeks driving around the city, spending more time looking for potential locations for photo opportunities.

I have a wonderful camera, probably one of the last true digital single lens reflex cameras that will be made by Nikon (a Nikon D850) as technology is now shifting to mirrorless cameras. I am still holding out a few more years until I am completely satisfied with the new technology and in my case as an amateur, I hope my camera lasts many more years. I also have some nice lenses that work great for portraits, but I haven’t used them to their full potential. My latest one, a Sigma 105mm f1.4 ART lens takes beautiful portraits, but I was never completely satisfied with its autofocusing on my Nikon camera. There is a way to adjust the focusing points on it, but that requires taking it out and testing it after it gets its firmware upgrade. I spent a few minutes tweaking the firmware for focusing and uploaded it to the lens and decided it was time to test it out on the only subjects I had in the house, namely Natalie and Willow.

The result was much better than I expected. Despite the image compression used to publish on a blog, the images look decent. They are much better in person and I have often struggled to try to get sharp images to display on this blog. These pictures were taken without a flash, but the pictures will be even better once I add the off-camera flash for the senior pictures planned later during the week. Natalie has agreed to be my assistant and Willow has agreed to stay home while we head out for senior picture day.