Portrait Essentials Workshop

Sometimes we need to challenge our comfort zone and try new things. In my case, that most recently meant dipping my toes into portraiture. Fortunately, my photo club offers workshops on portraiture, and I've started attending these. The first workshop, called Portrait Essentials, concentrated on "classical" posing. This was developed and popularized by Joe Zeltsman and Monte Zucker. It aims to produce flattering portraits of men and women using simple lighting. The workshop mainly took place in the photo club studio with the club's equipment. The key (main) light was a large gridded softbox 45 degrees to camera left (90 degrees for the profile shots). A large vertical stripbox immediately to camera right provided on-axis fill light. Finally, a socked beauty dish on a boom provided a hair light. The background was black seamless paper. I was one of six students for the morning session. We had the joy of working with Brianna, a professional model. She was fun to photograph and was an expert on the poses that we were struggling to learn. The workshop would have been much harder without her kind and subtle coaching. Over three hours, the instructors took us through a variety of poses with Brianna. These ranged from head and shoulders to full-body. Most were taken in the studio, and a few environmental portraits were taken with natural light in a hallway. This was a valuable learning experience for me on several levels and a fun way to spend a morning.