Scott James Reeves

Here’s the deal. Don’t worry about what kind/style of camera that will produce a good portrait shot. Worry more with settings and composition with your current camera. Don’t have one? Use your phone. You should have manual/pro settings. Explore them. See what certain ones do and how they interact with others. Then read about/watch videos about composition. Play with the settings. Don’t be in a hurry. Try b/w and color. Take your time and have fun. I use a rebelT1 and nifty 50. Very cheap and works fine. I am no pro and don’t get paid. I guess if I had made lots of money I’d have those red stripe lenses and 10k cameras. Don’t need it for personal pics.   You'll get your best portrait photos by shooting constantly and knowing how to compose an image. If your layout is strong and you shoot a lot you'll get WAY more great pictures of people than people with crazy expensive gear, lights, and aesthetically blessed subjects. The big bonus thing I can tell you outside of that is to jus...

It depends on what type of headshots you're looking to do. Acting headshots have a fairly standardized set of expectations that's different from corporate, and both are different from modeling, and all of those are different from small business/author/artist shots. The general ideas that are more universal are to have the subject well lit, and separated from the background. It should be distinct enough to be easily recognizable as the person in a small thumbnail of the photo, but there's not too much else similar. Overall you can use one of your lights for a key-light and the other as a rim-light or fill, but even then there's a lot of variation depending on how you want the end product to look. There's too much variation just within headshots to give one solution. Backgrounds are another factor- Sometimes a solid backdrop is best, but for other styles it works better to integrate the subject into the scene. Sometimes a bokeh blurred background is fine, other times ...