This photography school is turning into an enormous therapy session. If you scroll through my portfolio, you will learn that most of my photos have a close to zero number of people in them.
People would always look weird in my photos, somehow. And naturally, I told myself that was all my own fault. I wasn't capable of photographing people. Thankfully, I wasn't very sad about it anyway. Apart from having to put extra effort (pre-covid) into making sure, there were 0 people in my photos.
A few weeks ago, we had a studio lesson about portrait lighting. One of my friends volunteered to be a practice model. There were 3 setups available: rembrandt lighting, butterfly lighting, and glamour lighting. I started with the butterfly lighting and spend most of the time just focussing on the symmetry of the shadow in the face and forgetting to actually search for an image.
It wasn't until we got to the glamour lighting that I was able to relax a little. We became more playful in this space and thanks to my model's amazing acting skills I got a whole bunch of fun photos.
What I found most important about this lesson, was that my model-friend enjoyed her day and was happy to come model again whenever I needed someone. At home, it was time to learn how I had failed at some shots. A whole lot of rejected photos ended up in the bin. But There were also a couple of fun ones. And just that small amount of photos is enough for me to build a little bit of confidence in photographing humans...
All I can say to myself after this day was: "Not bad for a first try!"