Hi everyone today I will share my first experience of taking a portrait. Since I am not that famous, I am just a beginner so the model that I asked is my friend. His name is Mickey and he is running a blog “”
I did this photoshoot a year ago but I haven’t published it to anywhere because I thought that it’s not good enough, but now I change my mind. I just want to publish it no matter what. It was the first time anyway, so I should be proud of the result that I got.
First of all, I planned the photoshoot to be in the morning because the sun will be nice and soft when it shrine on a model face and the setting is a field around Thammasat University, where I am studying. It was full of high grass with golden color, a truly beautiful setting for the photoshoot.
We were there at the field at 7:30 am, the sun was nice and it was not that hot since it is very early in the morning. The bad thing about doing a photoshoot in the morning is that you could get tired very easily because your brain says “too early!”. I would recommend doing a photoshoot from 9 to 10 because it’s not too early and the sun is not much different from 7 am.
I actually have no plan for this photoshoot. There was no theme or anything, it is more of like a test shoot where you just wander around trying to get the best result from the location and time you have.
The first thing you need to do is that you should try to make your model and yourself relax, don’t make it too serious about getting the best shot. You should make it fun, otherwise, if the model is stress, you will see their facial expression and that will show in the picture. If the model do something wrong or they do not pose in the way that they suppose to do, you shouldn’t get mad and complain right away but instead you should tell them nicely to adjust their poses or position. One tip of model posing are that you can get a lot of references from the magazine and try to show the model what pose do you want. This will help you and your model to understand each other more.
In this photoshoot I did not have any particular light setting, I just went with the flow. What I did was that I tried to take a photo where the sun does not directly shrine on the model face. I personally prefer to put a model in shade area because it is easier to set where the light should be, but if it’s in the direct sunlight, it is hard to control because the light comes from everywhere.
In the end of this photoshoot, I ended up taking more than 300 photos but only a couple of them that is useable. There are about 30 pictures that seem OK but there are only 4 or 5 pictures that I really like. It took me about 2 hours to finish with the photoshoot and I think the outcome is great considering it as the first time.
For those of you who are scared of taking a portrait or to start your very first photoshoot, I would say just go for it. In my opinion, doing the photoshoot really give you a lot of experience. You will know how to work with the model and how to use a natural light. You will learn from your mistake. For me, I learned so many things from my first photoshoot. It boosted up my confident and give me the power to continue pursuing my career as a fashion photographer.
