The Portrait Photographer's Real Job (And Why Your Subject Is Working Against You)

The Portrait Photographer's Real Job (And Why Your Subject Is Working Against You)

Portrait sessions make me nervous in a way that landscape work never does. A mountain doesn’t care how it looks. A person absolutely does. And for the longest time, I couldn’t quite name what was actually happening in those first few awkward minutes of a shoot, when my subject is smiling too hard or standing too stiff, and I’m firing off frames that look technically fine but feel completely hollow.