How to Become a Portrait Photographer

Video Transcript

"My name is Anthony Maddaloni and I'm going to talk about how to become a portrait photographer. Portrait photography is an area of photography that you really have to identify with the person that you're taking a portrait with. And to a certain degree, you want to get to know the person, and even if it can be in thirty seconds, in sixty seconds. I like to ask a little bit about the person. What do they do? What kind of animals do they have? How long have they lived in the house you may be photographing them with? You just want to build a rapport, it's called, and that essentially builds trust. Incredibly important thing in becoming a portrait, a good portrait photographer. Number two is that you want to look at the lighting; you want to look at what type of people you want to photograph. It's extremely, extremely important that you think about this because if you find a certain, if you like photographing certain genre, if you like photographing families, or you like photographing sports teams, these are just portraits you can do of people. You could do sports portraits. You could do mom and children portraits, and these are portrait, genres of portrait photography that are extremely lucrative in some ways. This is one way you want to look at becoming a portrait photographer. You want to be slow; nobody likes having their picture taken rushed. You can't do a beautiful portrait in twenty seconds. Some photographers might take as long as two to three hours to do a good portrait, maybe even longer. But that's not to say that a really great portrait can't be done in a small amount of time. You want to look at your location. Where do I want to take the portrait of this person? Do I want the location itself to tell a story about the person? Or does that not even matter? You just want a location with nice even lighting. You might want to use a studio. These are beginning ways to become a portrait photographer, and then of course you want to build a portfolio of, let's say, your twenty best portraits. Show it to a potential client and that's how you would become a portrait photographer."