Outdoor Portrait Photography

Video Tutorials

How to Read Sun and Shade for Outdoor Portraits (Without Hauling a Single Light)

Most of my working life is spent in landscapes where there are no people in the frame. I’m chasing light across ridgelines, parking on forest roads before sunrise, standing in rivers at temperatures that my kids find genuinely alarming. Portraiture isn’t my primary language. But I lead photography workshops, and every single workshop includes at least one participant who freezes the moment the sun comes out. They look at the hard shadows falling across a face and they don’t know what to do.

September 10, 2026

Video Tutorials

What Landscape Photographers Get Wrong About Outdoor Portraits (And How to Fix It Fast)

Most of my working life is spent waiting. Waiting for light, waiting for clouds to shift, waiting for the river surface to go still. I am not, by any stretch, a portrait photographer. But here’s the thing about spending twenty years in the field: you develop an eye for how light falls on a subject, and eventually someone asks you to put a person in front of that light instead of a mountain.

September 10, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Shoot Beautiful Outdoor Portraits in Natural Light (Lessons from a Fashion Photographer's Workflow)

Most of my working life, I point the camera at mountains and rivers. But landscape photography teaches you to read light and location fast, and those same instincts translate directly into portraits the moment you step outside with a person instead of a peak. The problem I kept running into when I started collaborating with other photographers on composite projects and workshop shoots was this: I could find a beautiful location, but I didn’t have a systematic approach to moving a human subject through it efficiently and intentionally.

September 7, 2026