I recently found this very useful piece in a forum discussion that I thought I’d share…

As I learned more and more about portrait photography i started to get overwhelmed. There are so many rules of thumb and hard and fast rules and compositional rules and focusing rules and goodness, RULES on what makes a good portrait. I naturally took decent photos, but when I tried to take great ones that abided by all these rules, I took awful pictures, the more I learned the worse I got. I stopped shooting with my heart and was too far in my head.

There is so much information out there these days, so many forums and websites with so much available to you it is mind blowing. So what did I do to correct the err of my ways. I took one single aspect of what makes a good portrait and focuses on “mastering” (photography is rarely ever really mastered) each point and then moved on, building upon each step as I went.

Generally this is the way we learn most things, we learn addition before multiplication and multiplication before exponents, because we need to build on each block moving up. Try and take on a project each week or couple of weeks if that is what it takes. Yet with photography for some reason, more often than not, we think we have to learn it all at once, all at the same time. This is simply not an effective way to learn, while you may learn it, you might go crazy in the meantime.

These are the steps I took to practice, mind you I am still learning a lot and am by no means a master of anything, I just learned how to put all the pieces together without going nuts. Mind you, I still screw up each of these steps at least once a week, mostly distracting or limb chopping

My plan as I executed it:

1. Get out of priority anything and learn manual mode

2. Work on exposure, what makes proper exposure, learn your light meter, when matrix metering works best for you, when spot works. Get to the point of where you are consistently making properly exposed photos in manual mode. I suggest Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson as a starting point for this. Start off at this point with available and natural light

3. work on focus, work on getting what you want in focus each time, make sure your photos are still properly exposed. You may find that when you start on this step exposure will go out the window, and proper focus may not seem like it is that hard, I mean I have autofocus don’t I? But this is actually a lot trickier than one would think and it has a lot to do with proper aperture and shutter speed. Proper focus is what separates the men from the boys in photography and is perhaps the hardest obstacle to tackle when you are first learning. A larger aperture makes spot on focus harder, as does slower shutter speeds so find what works. Might I suggest learning the back button focus technique if your camera offers it, it is better to learn it early and incorporate it than to try and reinvent the wheel later. Also, important to learning focus is learning manual focus. This is a very difficult and daunting task, but it will help you tremendously I promise. Learning manual focus, especially being able to hit it quickly, will make your autofocus shots come out more the way you intended them too.  And for goodness sakes do not use focus recompose.
http://visual-vacations.com/Photogra…pose_sucks.htm

4. Work on composition overall, avoid distracting backgrounds and items in a picture. Don’t worry about things like posing yet, master the art of seeing what is wrong with everything else in the photo, a car in the background, a bright yellow ball in the corner, anything that will take away from your subject. Learn to see these things through your lens, or when you frame the shot and not just after you take it. Make sure of course that your focus and exposure (two most important aspects of your photo) are still correct.

5. Avoid chopped limbs. This one is SUPER hard and when I tried to learn this one, everything else went out the window, I was so focused on not cutting off an arm, leg or finger my photos were over exposed, out of focus, crooked, everything was totally wrong. It is important in a portrait not to create oddly cropped limbs.

6. learn to set up your shot to account for the rule of thirds. If you do not know the rule of thirds please go spend some time reading about it on Google, this is the most important piece of information you will ever learn about composition, it helps you learn to make a balanced photo and one that is aesthetically pleasing as well as artistically creative.

7. Photoshop, Photoshop, Photoshop, Photoshop and some more photoshop. Don’t rely on actions to edit your photos, if you don’t know exactly the steps the action is taking to edit your photo and why it works, you shouldn’t be using it because you won’t be able to control it. Try learning a new tip, trick or tool everyday, yes I said everyday. Even Scott kelby who literally wrote the book on photoshop (one I highly recommend by the way) finds new things in photoshop all the time, not just when Adobe adds them. You can learn something new everyday and spend you life doing it, even if it is just a new way to combine tools. Of course you can use your own editing tool, but it is very likely it doesn’t come close to comparing to photoshop.

8. Now learn other lighting techniques, by now you should have working with natural light down to some sort of science. Many people would disagree with me adding lighting as a last step, but a great photograph is built on focus and exposure first and foremost, a good portrait needs to have all the little things in place or it is lacking and if you are working on exposure and composition, not blowing out parts of your subject should have fit in there. By the time you tackly artificial light you should have all your other building blocks in place.

Generally when creating portraits you want to focus on the eyes, the eyes should tell the story about the person. Make sure you have good catchlights, and if you somehow have an awesome photo with no catchlights, photoshop them in, a technique you should be able to find by googling but if you can’t you can try PM’ing me and I will try and explain. Try to avoid distracting clothing and harsh lighting and of course, distracting backgrounds.

So what happens when you “almost” get the shot… you work with it!

Great advice from Kat Seymour – you can find her on the DPS forum as SheSPawn