Elizabeth photographing her boyfriend who thankfully modeled during our natural light portrait photography lesson in St. PetersburgFor our second of four 1-on-1 DSLR Photography Lessons in St. Petersburg, Florida Elizabeth brought her boyfriend and his brother to model for our lesson on natural light portraits. This was great for me as otherwise I would have had to of been the one in the shots as I am most of the time when students want to practice portraits. Bringing your own model also has the benefit of at the end of the lesson you have portraits of someone you know that you can share and display rather than twenty forgettable shots of yours truly.
Elizabeth will soon be investing in some strobist gear, so instead of bothering to use the almost useless popup flash in portraits practice, I had her put on her Canon 70-300mm lens and just use natural light and over exposing techniques to make some creative portraits all over the place, from under a shaded hall of columns (see above) to the interior of the Baywalk parking garage to the front steps of a museum.
Indeed we also practiced making silhouette shots atop the parking garage utilizing a railing high up in the air to create some rather cool images. Thanks to the models' willingness to go wherever we asked Elizabeth not only learned the technique for using natural light in portraits, but also actually ended up with some great shots of her boyfriend and his brother.
