Build up your Photo Portfolio with Friends

TOP TIP: If you have friends, then by default you also have a bunch of models for you to build up your portrait portfolio.

For most of my time as a photographer, I mainly focused on street photography as I enjoyed getting out of the house and my only focus being what I was seeing through my lens. But I still always had a lot of love for portrait photography. Portraits can be creative, cinematic and sometimes even sad and the versatility of the genre was what really peaked my interest. So when the time came to start shooting more portraits, I did what everyone should do from time to time,

I asked my friends for some help.

To my surprise, the process behind these shoots didn’t change as drastically as I expected when I compared it to when I shot with clients I had just met. But what I soon realised was that in order for me to get the best results from my shoots in general, there must be trust and great communication between me and my subject and this was a guarantee when working with my friends.

Something I had to understand is that working with people you already know doesn’t take away anything from the work you produce. What I realised is that It’s not a necessity of mine to work with established models or celebrities. At the end of the day I just want to be doing something creative… Ego tends to cloud ones judgement no matter what you’re doing in life and I didn’t want it to end up clouding mine in the long term as it would only hurt me and the quality of my photography…

If you think that you won’t find other opportunities to work with new people by shooting with your friends, your wrong. Thanks to the portraits I took, I made new connections which led to way more work opportunities than I envisioned.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it truly comes down to what you define as ‘success’. Is it defined by how many models you’ve worked with or is it defined by the quality of your photos?

So to anyone who wants to get into portrait photography but doesn’t know where to start, text your friends and give them a time, a date, and a brief idea of what you have in mind for your shoot together. Send them your pinterest boards, bounce ideas around and then get straight to work.

But most importantly, make sure you have fun and come away from the shoot with something great.

Life’s way too short to start limiting what gets added to your portfolio…