How to Do a Photo Shoot

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Steve Anthony, professional photographer with steveanthonystudios.com. In this clip I am going to show you how to do a photo shoot. Now the basic elements in order to do a photo shoot are a camera, preferably a quality camera over of the SLR variety this gives you much more control over your exposure than just a point and shoot camera but if that's all you have that's okay you can work with that too but in this instance we are using an SLR Digital Camera. The rules apply to digital as well as film. Now you are also going to need a subject. In this particular instance we have a young man who is an actor who needs a head shot so we are going to use him as the subject for our photo shoot and you need light. Now you can be creative if you don't have lighting equipment you can use natural light, take the subject outdoors preferably not into direct sunlight into either a shaded area or some sort of an over hang that will block out the sunlight but give good soft reflected light from behind you. That's the best way to get a good natural lighting on a subject. You also should have some sort of light modifier such as a reflector, a silver reflector is good to hold under or along side of the subject in order to reflect back some light to fill in shadows. They are created from the existing light source and when you are working with the subject it is very important to make them comfortable with you so you talk to them and you develop a rapport and that makes them relax and makes them more natural in front of the camera and you want to be sure to look at every aspect of the frame when you are doing a photo shoot, not only are you looking into their eyes but you want to see how their clothing is laying maybe the collar is laying over in such a way that you don't like it well make sure that you tweak that before you start taking the picture but the most important thing is like I say have a comfortable rapport with your subject, make sure that your exposure allows you to hand hold your camera if you are not using a tripod so I would recommend a shutter speed of at least a 125th of a second, maybe a 250th or even higher if you can get away with it depending on how much light you have and what your ISO rating is."