Last month I was on a shoot with a friend who wanted some updated headshots, just casual stuff in her backyard, nothing fancy. I kept stopping myself mid-shot because I couldn’t figure out why the images felt stiff. The light was fine. The lens was fine. She looked great. Something about the direction I was giving her was falling flat, and I couldn’t name it in the moment.

That nagging feeling is exactly why I sat down with episode 700 of The Grid, a long-running photography talk show by KelbyOne. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube. This particular episode is a big one, a milestone episode featuring Scott Kelby alongside three working photographers: Dixie Dixon, Ibarionex Perello, and Joe Edelman. Each of them shoots people differently, in different contexts, with different philosophies. The overlap between their approaches is where the real teaching lives.

The One Thing All Four Photographers Agree On

Before we get into settings and gear, here is the foundation that every single one of these photographers comes back to, in different words: the person in front of your camera has to feel comfortable before any of the technical stuff matters.

Ibarionex Perello, who shoots documentary-style portraits and street work, talks about connection as the first act of photography. You are not just framing a shot. You are managing a human being’s experience of being seen. Joe Edelman echoes this from the fashion and glamour side, emphasizing that your energy as a photographer is contagious. If you are unsure, your subject picks it up immediately. If you are confident and warm, they settle into it.

This sounds soft and intangible until you realize it is actually a workflow step. Before you even raise the camera, you spend time. You talk. You slow down. That is not wasted time. That is the setup.

How to Give Direction Without Sounding Like a Robot

Joe Edelman gets specific here in a way I found immediately useful. A lot of photographers give directions that are physically correct but emotionally empty. “Turn your shoulders. Tilt your chin down. Move your hand.” These are instructions, not invitations.

What Edelman suggests instead is directing toward a feeling or a story. “Think about someone you haven’t seen in a while who just walked through the door.” That kind of direction produces a micro-expression that no technical instruction could manufacture. Your subject stops performing and starts reacting.

Dixie Dixon, who does a lot of commercial and athletic work, builds on this with movement. Static poses are harder to hold naturally than people think. She has subjects walk toward her, then stops them mid-step. Or she has them look away and then look back on a count. Motion breaks the self-consciousness that kills portraits. Even a small shift, weight from one foot to the other, can reset the whole frame.

Reading Light Before You Set Up a Single Thing

Scott Kelby walks through something that clicks immediately if you have ever over-complicated a location. When he arrives somewhere new, he looks for the light first, not the background. The background is secondary and adjustable. The quality of light falling on a face is what drives everything else.

He specifically talks about looking for open shade, not just any shade, but shade where there is still a large open sky or bright reflected surface acting as a natural softbox. The difference between harsh midday shade and open shade that has a big bright wall nearby is dramatic. One gives you flat, muddy light. The other gives you dimensional, soft light with actual catchlights in the eyes.

The practical step he outlines: hold your hand up palm-facing-you and rotate slowly. Watch how the light changes across your palm from different angles. Your hand tells you more in ten seconds than ten minutes of deliberation.

When the “Right” Approach Doesn’t Work for Your Subject

Here is where I want to add something from my own experience, because these four photographers are largely shooting subjects who have agreed to be photographed in some kind of collaborative session. Ibarionex does documentary work that is more candid, but even he is working with people who are largely aware of the camera.

Where I have found this framework gets complicated is with extremely camera-shy subjects, people who are not just nervous but who have a real history of disliking how they look in photos. All the warm energy and movement direction in the world sometimes backfires because it draws more attention to the fact that a camera is pointed at them.

What I have landed on for those situations is almost the opposite: I do not direct at all for the first fifteen minutes. I just shoot. I let them watch me work, adjust things, look at the back of the camera on unrelated frames. By the time I actually want the shot, the camera has become boring furniture. That approach does not make it into a lot of tutorials because it is slow and it does not produce a clean step-by-step, but it is the only thing that has consistently worked for me with that type of subject.

The Takeaway That Changes How You Walk Into a Shoot

The technical stuff in this episode, light reading, movement direction, posing mechanics, is genuinely useful. But the thing I keep coming back to is simpler: your job before you press the shutter is to make the other person feel like being photographed is a good idea.

Everything else is downstream from that.

Watch the full tutorial on YouTube to see all four photographers demonstrate these ideas visually, because watching how they each move around a subject teaches you something that words cannot fully capture.