After three short portrait sessions with friends (first two here and here!), I can say I’ve gotten just about enough experience in portraiture to be a little dangerous during a photo shoot. 🙂
Finagling how to balance flash with ambient light, place light sources, and pose a subject are three areas I am still working on, but in all three of my short sessions, I have learned new skills in varying scenarios. The first with Matt Simmons saw me working under different-colored fluorescent light, then under the shade during a bright day. The second with Ashley Montgomery let me experiment with balancing flash with the sun to create highlights from the now two light sources, and figure out some feminine poses. Finally, my most recent shoot with Melissa Moberg challenged me to constantly adapt to ambient light levels that quickly dropped from sunset to twilight.
It’s never easy, is it?
Regardless, this short session was just as much fun as the other two, and hopefully I now have a little bit better of an idea of how posed portraiture “works” with off-camera light sources. Again, for this shoot I used a Sony NEX-7 with the Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8, Nikon 85mm f/1.4 AI-s, and Nikon 200mm f/2 AI-s. Light source often was a single 60-inch reflective umbrella, sometimes balanced with ambient light. Here we go!
That’s all for this series of short sessions, thanks for dropping by! The big first wedding gig is coming up fast, and there likely will be a bevy of photographs to share soon. Don’t forget to subscribe to be notified of new posts! 😀
Matthew Durr Photography 
great site you have here.
I found you due to a review in Sony 35mm f1.8 lens.
May I suggest something?
To spend some more time in Post processing:
Lighten up the whites in the eyes of your subjects.
Also study a little more dodging and burning. For this one you can study some make-up techniques to see why we darken specific areas on the face and choose to lighten (or give a colour tint) other areas.
Posing, framing, compositions, lighting, everything is great in your work. But a little more post-processing can satisfy your customers even more.
Thanks for the suggestion. I tend to shy away from post-processing any further than levels or basic retouching. However, I do lighten/darken certain areas of the face depending on the lighting (lightening shadows on the eyes, darkening blown highlights, etc.).