RJ Bradbury Photography
Unit 1 Ground Floor, Woodbank Works
Turncroft Lane,
Stockport SK1 4AR
UK
Call: 07763 418 761
Email: rick@rjbradbury.com
Copyright
RJ Bradbury Photography
2024 / 2025
All Rights Reserved
When starting in portrait photography it is all too easy to get sucked in to studio or off camera flash world when really what we need to do is to start simple with natural / available light.
For this we don’t need a ton of kit.
If you have a camera & lens you can get to work and if you want to add a few tools to offer a lot of control you can do so very affordably.
I had a question sent via DM on Instagram from agent called Nick.
Nick asked “ Rick, in terms of lighting for my little studio That’s 4m wide I’m thinking 1 to 2 citi 300 and 2 pika 200s. That should do it?”
In the video below I go over how I would approach this question and it may not be what you would think.
Portrait photography? If we look a the basic definition on Wikipedia it is
A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant.
That said I feel that portrait photography today has become more of just an image of a person or an image to follow a tread be that a technical one or one of post-production… instead of being an actual portrait of the person on set which has been crafted via collaboration, getting to know and breaking down the often larger than life persona that we all put up in today’s world (especially online).
We need to refocus on the making of a portrait and less on the technical or what the next person down the road is doing? Trends will come and go but good colour and simple black & white will always be here to stay. A good portrait shows part of the real person, a real moment. something genuine and it should in my opinion not need to rely on the postproduction to carry it forwards.
The hardest thing to learn in portrait photography is learning the psychology of it all and building relationships and rapport on set. Sure we need the technical knowledge but that need to be nailed so it gets out of the way so we can focus on making the portrait.
I go into this in more detail in the video below and would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.
Thank you for reading and watching.
Rick