For quite some time, recording the growth of a young family has been a catalyst for many parents to take up an interest in photography. Family photography serves many purposes on many levels and professional photographers have been satisfying this demand for decades...

A studio is a place where you can control the light. A purpose made studio is usually a big empty light tight box and, while the walls can in theory be any colour, in practice mid to dark grey is often a favourite. Dark grey is chosen because any stray light hitting the walls is reflected back with neutral colour and can be more easily controlled. By contrast, in a studio with white walls it is hard to get a deep shadow because there is so much light bouncing around.

The Portrait Masterclass series continues with a look at how to set up indoor portraits that make use of available light but also offer shelter from the weather

From October to April the available light for portraiture indoors is in short supply. The quality, however, is as good as anything you might find at any other time of the year, and those who master what it has to offer have the potential to produce great images.

Portrait photographs have a unique characteristic in that generally they will require a shutter speed that is fast enough to control subject movement, and the best way to achieve this is to set a high ISO value. There are exceptions to every rule, of course, and the one that springs to my mind is...

Damien Lovegrove's Portrait Masterclass series is a comprehensive guide to tackling a variety of portrait situations. In this first installment, he tackles portrait shooting in winter...

In many ways there is no mystery to great portrait photography. What you need are people skills to allow you to put those who are in front of your camera at ease. You also have to develop an eye for a promising situation, plus the ability to read the light and the potential of the chosen environment.

You also need to be able to think laterally and to get away from the notion that portraiture is all about static situations and convoluted studio lighting. Artificial lighting can have its place of course, which is something we’ll get to later on in this series, but I want to show that it’s equally possible to produce excellent portraits using just basic ingredients that are available to all photographers, whether they are experienced professionals or raw beginners.