Portrait Photography Tips

A common misconception is that bright, sunny conditions make the best portraits. In reality, harsh overhead sun creates unflattering shadows under the eyes and nose. Soft, directional light — early morning, late afternoon, or an overcast sky — is far more forgiving and is why I favour golden hour and cloudy days over midday sun whenever the schedule allows.

If we do end up shooting at midday, I'll position you in open shade — under a tree, beside a building — rather than direct sun, which softens the same harsh light without losing the ambient brightness.

This sounds almost too simple to mention, but it's the most reliable predictor of how a session goes. Tiredness shows in the eyes and around the mouth before it shows anywhere else, and it's very hard to edit out convincingly. A good night's sleep and enough water the day before does more for your photos than most preparation people spend money on.

Sessions that have a small emotional anchor — a graduation, a birthday, a first year living in Copenhagen, an anniversary — tend to produce better expressions than sessions with no context at all, simply because there's something real to think about and talk about during the shoot. If you don't have an occasion, that's completely fine too; I'll just ask more questions to get you talking and relaxed.

Clients who arrive with a folder of thirty reference photos are often disappointed, because trying to recreate someone else's exact pose, in a different location, with different light, rarely looks as natural as it did in the reference. It's more useful to arrive with two or three reference images purely as a mood indicator — 'more like this, less like that' — and let the actual poses adapt to you and the location in the moment.

The best portraits usually come from the five minutes nobody planned, not the shot everyone was aiming for.

A held, performed smile reads as stiff within a fraction of a second on camera. Genuine expressions come from being asked something, reacting to something, or simply talking through the session rather than posing and waiting. I ask real questions throughout a shoot for exactly this reason — the pause before you answer often produces a better frame than the answer itself.

Two outfits is the sweet spot for a 45-minute session — enough variety without eating into shooting time. Trying to fit in more changes usually means rushing the actual photography, which shows up as a slightly tense, hurried feeling across the gallery.

Portraits often look and feel different from the inside than they do in the final frame — a pose that feels awkward to hold can look completely natural once the angle, light and moment come together. I'll check the back of the camera with you early in the session so you can calibrate against the real result instead of how it feels in the moment.