Photography 101 – notes from the field

Consider this my photography 101 — eleven years of shooting, distilled into the notes I actually still use. Camera craft, editing, working with the person in front of your lens, and the unglamorous details that separate a hobby from a practice. No fluff; just what has held up.

Your camera

• Learn manual early, and properly. It becomes instinct — these days I can read the weather and know roughly where my ISO needs to sit before the camera is out of the bag (check anyway). Manual gives you authorship over light, depth of field and the exact moment worth keeping. Nothing else does.
• Spot metering has been my default for years. Meter for the face, let the rest of the frame fall where the story needs it.
• Learn your Kelvin white balance. Auto white balance is competent, but dialling Kelvin by hand — higher for warmth, lower for cool — is how you keep a consistent palette across an entire shoot instead of fixing it frame by frame in the edit.
• Let go of manual focus for sessions. Perfect it for the tricky, deliberate shots — but when a client is mid-laugh, autofocus wins. Speed in the moment matters more than purism.

Editing

Lightroom

Lightroom is where the edit begins: batch processing keeps an entire gallery coherent, which matters more than any single spectacular frame. My workflow runs Lightroom first, Photoshop second — and because a Photoshop pass is saved alongside the original Lightroom edit, I can compare the two and catch myself when I have over-worked an image. The restraint is the skill.

Photoshop

If you photograph people, learn Photoshop properly. I started in January 2018; within a year it had changed what I could deliver — removing a stray sign or a piece of litter is table stakes, but the real craft is subtler than that.

Learn to dodge and burn. Study where natural shadow falls on a face — the way a makeup artist studies contouring — and your retouching stops looking like retouching. It is the single technique that most separates a flat edit from a finished one.

Presets

Do not buy presets. Build your own. Your edit is your signature — it should come from your taste, developed frame by frame, not from a template a thousand other photographers also bought. It takes longer. It is worth it.

On set: directing people, not posing them

Music changes a session. A small portable speaker and a few considered playlists will do more for your portraits than a new lens — empowering, main-character energy for individual sessions; something slower and romantic when photographing couples.

Then direct with intention: ask a couple to dance and let them forget you are there; tell your subject she is the lead in the music video. It sounds simple. It works every time, because people photograph best when they stop performing.

And talk to people like a host, not a technician. How did you meet? Where are you from? What is your story? Offer your own in return. Presence in front of a camera starts with comfort, and comfort starts with you.

Delivering images

After years of cycling through CDs, Google Drive and Dropbox, I settled on Pixieset — elegant client galleries that present the work the way it deserves to be seen, with delivery, favourites and downloads handled cleanly. How your images arrive is part of the experience you are selling.

Pricing and packages

Early in my career I worked in a university town, and it taught me a lasting lesson about pricing: meet your market without cheapening your craft. Shorter sessions at accessible prices — thirty focused minutes instead of a discounted hour — let me serve clients who could not reach my full rate, without ever putting my standard on sale.

On structuring packages: offer three. The first is the essentials. The second is where the value clearly lives. The third is priced noticeably above it. Most clients choose the middle — which is exactly the one you designed them to choose.

Social media

Choose your photography communities carefully. Constructive criticism builds you; comment-section bravado does not. Scope a group before you post your work in it — protect your creative confidence the way you would protect your gear.

And use the free education that exists in absurd abundance: Julia Trotti, Sorelle Amore, Jessica Kobeissi, Peter McKinnon and Mango Street taught me more than most paid courses would have.

There are more social media and marketing notes in this post.

Keep shooting,
Siobhan

That’s my Photography 101, in a nutshell

This photography 101 is what I wish someone had handed me at the start — the camera settings, the editing workflow and the client-facing details nobody mentions until you learn them the hard way. If you would like to see where eleven years of these notes lead, my portrait portfolio is the honest answer — and if you are a fellow photographer, take what is useful and make it your own.