What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than a stroll along the Southbank with nothing better to do that take a few portraits. A recent 36exp client chose to do a 3 hour one to one photography training session on portrait photography doing just this.

Starting at the Royal Festival Hall we headed east along the Southbank, here are some of the portraits:

We do like a bit of concrete. It gives a neutral colour and a flat light which is ideal for portraits. In this first shot, taken near the Royal Festival Hall, we made use of that and also of some steps to pose our subject. The steps create a strong diagonal in the photo which works because strong diagonals just look good in photos!

Taken very close by, the bright blue background and the words on the wall were just too good to miss out on in our second image. You’ll notice that we have direct sunlight in this photo, and our subject’s face is directly facing it. This ensures we don’t have any awkward shadows being cast by the nose. Also, our subject’s eye line draws us towards the words.

A short walk took us to the river. Positioning our subject with her back to the sun gives a nice light on her hair. By slightly overexposing the face we get great skin tones, and it overexposes the background slightly which looks great. The strong line of the railing towards the bottom of this photo give it some structure.

Luckily for us the Thames was at low tide, so we ventured onto the ‘beach’. We found loads of character and this amazing deep green moss which were great to shoot with. Both of these images make good use of the colour and textures. Our model’s neutral outfit works well here (imagine if she’d been wearing a colour, things would look much different).  The chain works well as a frame for her face in the first shot, and the posts disappearing off into the background give a great sense of depth to the second.

And finally, a park bench with autumn leaves. We cheated a bit here and threw those leaves onto the bench, but sometimes you have to manipulate things make a photo work, which it does here.

We were lucky to have a bright day with thin cloud cover, so we had a bright diffused light to work with. Thanks to our model, Twig, for being a great subject.