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One of the very basic rules of photography is the one that seems to be the most obvious one (but not always): always take your camera with you wherever you go. Of course, there are certain situations (dinner at your parents in law, funeral, again dinner at your parents in law) where you are not expected  to take it with you but there are situations/conditions or places where you could take your camera with you but you forget. I have learned it myself the hard way long time ago. One of the recent unexpected and not planned photo sessions is a set of pictures of Josine.

Unfortunately, sometimes unexpected situations or photo sessions mean that you might not have all the necessary equipment with you. But at the same time it doesn’t make much sense to take all the equipment with you all the time – the most important are the camera, your eyes and creativity..ohh.. and a subject for pictures. Some of you might notice that the use of a light reflector for some pictures could be handy, especially in such light. Here comes the second important rule of portrait photography: never, I mean NEVER, take portrait pictures in strong sun (unless you want to create a special mystery in pictures by tweaking them in post-production). Strong light/sun creates lots of contrast in pictures and some features typical for portraits will be either gone, exaggerated or just a customer will be very dissatisfied from the final result because he or she won’t look natural in the pictures.

What is particularly interesting about Josine as a model and in this set of pictures are two things: eyes and curly hair. I tried to concentrate on these features since it was NOT a real portrait photo session. Why? I believe that for a portrait session or portrait pictures, you need to have a person in his/her natural environment (work, home, etc). Therefore, portraits are not only about a person, but also about the environment in which a person operates, lives, works, etc. In portraits, a person is complemented with the surrounding, which provides additional information about the person. Only such portraits establish well the image of a person.

For the time being, the extract with few selected pictures of Josine are below. You can find all the pictures on my Flickr account here