Here is a situation I have been in more times than I care to admit: I’m out on one of my Sunday morning photo walks, I spot a great face or an interesting stranger, I get the shot, and then I get home and realize I was shooting at f/8 because I had just come from a landscape and forgot to dial back down. The subject is sharp. The background is sharp.
There’s a specific kind of pressure that comes with photographing someone who actually matters to you personally. Not a client you found through a job board, but someone whose work shaped who you are. I felt that pressure the first time I photographed a musician I’d listened to all through college. My hands were steadier on my camera than my nerves deserved. That is exactly the situation Peter McKinnon walked into when he flew to Los Angeles to document a collaboration between jewelry brand Clocks and Colors and drummer Travis Barker.
One of the questions I get most often from readers is some version of: “I’ve watched hundreds of tutorials, but I still feel stuck. What’s missing?” I know exactly what they mean, because I felt it too. Generic advice gets you only so far. At some point, you need someone to look at your photos, spot your specific habits, and tell you what to fix. That gap between consuming information and actually improving is real, and it’s the reason personalized photography instruction matters more than people give it credit for.
There’s a particular kind of pressure that comes with shooting film portraits. No chimping. No histogram. No safety net of a burst mode full of options. Every frame costs something, and that cost forces a level of intentionality that digital photography, for all its convenience, rarely demands of us. I’ve shot a lot of film over the years, but I always find myself circling back to tutorials from photographers who work at the intersection of creativity and craft.
When I first started building out a home studio setup, I made every rookie mistake in the book. I bought modifiers I didn’t understand, placed them wherever felt intuitive, and wondered why my portraits still looked harsh and flat. The white shoot-through umbrella was the first modifier that genuinely changed that, mostly because it’s cheap enough that I wasn’t afraid to experiment with it. But “cheap and forgiving” doesn’t mean you can just point it at your subject and call it a day.
The Portrait Photography Explosion I’ve been reflecting lately on just how much our visual culture has shifted. The numbers are staggering: people worldwide are capturing somewhere between 93 million and nearly a billion portraits every single day. Think about that for a moment. Whether it’s casual selfies, professional headshots, or intimate family photos, portrait photography has become the dominant form of image-making in our time. This boom is evident everywhere I look—from the massive sales figures for 85mm prime lenses to the portrait modes now standard on every smartphone.
If you shoot portraits outdoors with any regularity, you already know the specific frustration I’m talking about. It’s noon, the light is brutal, and your subject is squinting into a sky that’s basically one giant flashbang. You twist every dial on your camera trying to salvage the shot, and every single result looks flat, blown out, or just plain unflattering. I’ve been there more times than I can count, including on a trip to Portugal where I spent three days chasing “golden hour” and completely ignored the six hours of perfectly usable harsh light in between.
Senior guy sessions used to make me nervous in a way I didn’t fully understand at first. I’d show up with a solid location, good light, a clear plan, and then my subject would stand there looking stiff and vaguely uncomfortable, like he was waiting for a bus rather than sitting for a portrait. The problem wasn’t the light. It wasn’t the settings. It was the posing, specifically, the fact that most posing language I’d internalized was built around photographing women.
Mastering Long Exposure Portraits: Creating Dreamlike Images with Slow Shutter Speeds When I first experimented with long exposure portraiture, I was amazed at how a simple adjustment to my shutter speed could completely transform the mood and narrative of an image. What started as curiosity about an “advanced” technique has become one of my favorite creative tools, and I’m excited to share what I’ve learned with you. What Makes Long Exposure Portraits Different?
I used to think studio lighting was something you either had an instinct for or you didn’t. For the first couple of years I shot portraits seriously, I’d spend more time second-guessing my light placement than actually shooting. It wasn’t until I started watching photographers work through setups in real time, out loud, in front of an audience, that I started to understand the logic underneath it all. There’s something about watching a pro troubleshoot on their feet that no static tutorial can replicate.
Every Sunday morning I take a photo walk through Seattle. It’s my reset, my practice, my church. And for the longest time I would walk past neon-lit storefronts, laundromats, late-night diners, and think: “cool sign,” and keep moving. It took watching someone else work to realize I was walking past free, beautiful light every single week. That realization hit me hard while watching Peter McKinnon’s collaboration tutorial with photographer Brandon Woelfel.
Why Sigma’s New 85mm f/1.2 Lens Is a Game-Changer for Portrait Photographers When I first heard that Sigma was releasing an 85mm f/1.2 lens, my immediate reaction was curiosity rather than surprise. After all, this focal length at this aperture has become somewhat of a holy grail for portrait photographers. What caught my attention, though, was where Sigma was making their move: Sony E-mount and Leica L-mount systems. Filling a Critical Gap For years, photographers using Sony mirrorless or Leica cameras had limited options for ultra-fast 85mm lenses.