The Rush of Creating Better Portraits

The photography rabbit hole is a deep, intricate system of balancing what you want with what you got.

Natural light vs artificial. Hand-held tripod vs flycam. $250 for the non-stabilized 25mm f1.7 vs $300 (on sale) 42.5mm f1.7 micro 4/3 lenses. It never ends. Constant decision making and lots of seemingly useless numbers and gear. But really, the more I learn about photography is that, like music, it is a highly mathematical form of art. The crafting of a great photograph is commonly referred to as composing.Crop factors, speedlite recovery times, frames per second, endless aperature-shutterspeed-ISO calculations. So much of what I'm learning to be intentionally good photography is a numbers game.

But because I'm a newbie, I'm just kind of stumbling around and experimenting with light, settings that seem good and very patient, gracious models.

We must have worked for 30 minutes to get this pose. Lots of communication and back-and-forth.