London portrait shoot |Patrick Arends

London portrait shoot

Reflecting on my recent photographic journey with Arteh Odjidja (see post below this one), I thought it would be good to re-visit my first photography workshop with Thorsten Overgaard in London. Thorsten is a professional photographer, writer and educator from Aarhus, Denmark and travels around the world shooting assignments and hosting photography workshops. He shoots Leica cameras only and has a very down to earth approach to photography, making this fantastic muse very simple to understand, and improve your skills instantly.

My most memorable moment in the workshop was the portrait shoot. Thorsten covered all the essentials you need to keep in mind when shooting portraits. Finding a location, measuring light, calibration of the colour temperature, how to use a reflector to improve the articulation, the composition of the whole, keeping an eye out for the little details that you can’t really expect to see on the back of your camera. These were all very practical and aimed at improving the results. Simply no fluff around the edges! (more...)

There’s a lot to take away from his workshop (highly recommended) and there are plenty of detailed online reviews by others if you want to read about all the ins and outs, however a few specific attitudes stood out to me.

Find the right light
This is absolutely key for creating great portraits. Without good light, no one looks good. Make people look good. When they use your photograph as their Facebook or LinkedIn profile, you know you’ve done something right!

Think positively only!
Before you edit any photographs, the single thing you need to spend time on is just looking for the right shot, which one has potential, and rate those in your Lightroom software, so you can then filter on rated photographs only. It’s a waste of time trawling through hundreds of pictures and deleting the ones you don’t like. Too much time wasted on thinking bad thoughts… Look for the great ones only!