It seems like I’ve been talking about a new portraits post for ages. As it turns out, it has in fact been almost exactly just over a year since I started working on this second portraits post. I have never claimed to be punctual.

My last portraits post contained only a handful of images, which I believed, at the time, to be the sum total of the portraits I had taken up to that point. That post contained a dozen images, all of which I was very proud of. Only a day or so after publishing that post, I discovered a few more images on my computer which were too good to leave be, so they got a quick followup post of their own. My thinking was, it had taken years to build up that many images that could be considered portraits, so it might be a while until I had enough to be able to publish another ‘portraits’ post; I’d better get them out whilst the proverbial iron was warm.

Since then, I’ve been sifting any portrait-like images from sets, holding them over and compiling another portrait set. As I procrastinated over writing the post, the shortlist of images got longer and longer. After building confidence photographing my niece and family (and to an extent, it becoming expected that I would occasionally photograph people as well as things) I began shooting more and more people. The shortlist continued to grow. Always writing more traditional posts, but quietly putting any portraits aside for later.

Eventually, the levees were going to break. So here we are, finally, finally looking at the portraits post I’ve been talking about for over a year. So let’s take a look at what I’ve got. I’m going to go through these in chronological order so that, hopefully, the learning curve can be apparent.

The first few images actually predate my first portraits post, images I overlooked or simply forgot whilst compiling the first compendium.

1/15sec, f/3.5, ISO 100, exposure bias -0.33, 18mm (cropped)

Although to be fair, this image of my friend Lewis was probably missed the first time round because the original in-camera image looked like this.

This next image is from just before the Bournemouth Air Festival in 2011; in fact, it’s a shot of my wife taken on the journey.

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