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The Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast

The Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast

Written by: Paul Wilkinson
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 Tales, techniques, tricks and tantrums from one of the UK’s top portrait photographers. Never just about photography but always about things that excite - or annoy - me as a full-time professional photographer, from histograms to history, from apertures to apathy, or motivation to megapixels. Essentially, anything and everything about the art, creativity and business of portrait photography. With some off-the-wall interviews thrown in for good measure!Copyright 2020 All rights reserved. Art Economics Leadership Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • EP169 Stop Killing Your Prints: A Judge’s Guide To Common Competition Mistakes

    EP169 Stop Killing Your Prints: A Judge’s Guide To Common Competition Mistakes
    Nov 18 2025
    If you’ve ever stared at a “competition worthy” image and thought, “Is this actually any good, or am I just emotionally attached and mildly delusional?” then this episode is for you. In this one, I’m lifting the lid on what really happens inside a judge’s head when your prints hit the panel: the mindset you need, the mistakes we see over and over again, and the tiny details that can quietly kill an otherwise beautiful image. We’ll talk blown highlights, grubby greys, over sharpening, dodgy mounts, vignettes turned up to eleven, and why blindly following the latest photo trend might actually sink your chances. We’ll also get into mentors, titles, paper choice, time pressure (my personal kryptonite), and why the only real failure in competitions is not to enter at all. If you’re thinking about qualifications, print comps or you just want to finish your images to a higher standard, grab a drink, have a listen, and then go and do something brave with your work. Links from this episode Workshops & mentoring: Come and spend a day (or more) with us at the studio, learning lighting, posing, dogs, families, workflow and everything in between. 👉 View upcoming workshops One year mentoring programme: If you want ongoing support with competition entries, qualifications panels and growing your portrait business, this is where we dig in properly. 👉 Find out about one to one mentoring Mastering Portrait Photography – the book (new edition): The fully updated edition of the book, packed with new images, new sections and new stories. 👉 Buy the book on Amazon Signed copies from the studio: If you would like a signed copy straight from our studio (possibly with a bit of dog hair in the packaging courtesy of Rufus), order here. 👉 Order a signed copy Leave a review for the podcast: Reviews genuinely help more photographers find the show and it means the world to us when you leave one. 👉 Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts The Societies’ image competition: If this episode has nudged you towards entering, this is a great place to start. 👉 Enter The Societies’ image competition Transcript [00:00:00] it's Thursday, late afternoon, early evening. It's gone dark. It's November. I've got what's left of a mug of coffee next to me. And I just thought I'd sit and record this podcast. It's been, it has to be said a really good day. We've had a lovely client in seeing their wedding pictures, which is always lovely when it goes the way it did. Lots of tears. Their's, not mine. Um, they love them. They've picked well for their album, cannot wait to produce that for them. It's been a really good week. Lots of nice clients, but over the next few days, Sarah and I are really hoping we get to step away from it just for a bit. We were hoping to get abroad, but it looks like with scheduling issues, that isn't gonna quite happen. But we live in an area stuck between London and Oxford, so at the very least we have a huge proportion of interesting things to go and have a look at. And that's my hope is we get away from this beautiful business that I love, but it really is all encompassing. So just for a day or [00:01:00] two time to take a bit of a break, I'm Paul and this is the Mastering Portrait Photography podcast. So, hello one and all. I hope you're all well in this particular podcast, um, because I'm hoping to get out the door and go for a drink tonight with some friends. Um, a little less waffle and a , slightly more to the point podcast. Probably some of you will prefer that some of you might miss the randomness. Um, however, if you listen to the last podcast, it was a little bit about what it's like to be a judge when you are assessing qualifications, panels, and print judging in general. Today what I wanted to do was go through some of the things that [00:02:00] occur to me that may be applicants either don't know or quietly ignore, which might be the truth. But basically the things that as judges we see, and I thought I just stepped through it from that point of view. Slightly less about the judges, slightly more about what to look for if you are entering a competition. Now, I've done this style of podcast. I think this might be my fourth, fifth, maybe sixth version of it over the years, can you believe it's been nearly 10 years I've been recording this. Um, either way, what I wanted to do was just update it, go through some of the things that are fresh in my mind from judging qualifications a few weeks ago, and then judging the Print Master's competition, um, just, uh, a couple of weeks ago. Both of those, you learn different things. You see different things, but I thought I'd just relay, if I can, the stuff that maybe you should consider if you are thinking about entering, in particular, print competitions, [00:03:00] but this extends out to really any image competition you can, you can think of. So with that, if that's not your shtick, then this isn't the episode for you. But if you ...
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    53 mins
  • EP168 Inside The Print Room - What It's Like To Be A Judge

    EP168 Inside The Print Room - What It's Like To Be A Judge
    Nov 8 2025
    Husky voice, Friday night whiskey, and a mountain of cheese from the book launch. In this episode I lift the lid on what really happens inside a print judging room. The rotation of five from a pool of seven. Silent scoring so no one nudges anyone else. How a challenge works, what the chair actually does, and why we start with impact, dive through craft, then finish on impact again to see what survives. Layout over composition, light as the whole game, and a final re-rank that flattens time drift so the right image actually wins. If you enjoy a peek behind the curtain, you will like this one. You can grab a signed copy of the new Mastering Portrait Photography at masteringportraitphotography.com and yes, I will scribble in it. If you already have the book, a quick Amazon review helps more than you know. Fancy sharpening your craft in person? Check the workshops page for new dates and come play with light at the studio. The book: https://masteringportraitphotography.com/resource/signed-copy-mastering-portrait-photography-new-edition/ Workshops: https://masteringportraitphotography.com/workshops-and-mentoring/ Transcript [00:00:00] Hey, one and all. How are you doing? Now? I'll be honest, I still have the remnants of a cold, and if you can hear that in my voice, I do apologize, I suppose you could call it slightly bluesy, but you can definitely hear that I'm ever so slightly husky. It's Friday night, it's eight 30, and I was, I've been waiting a week to record this podcast, hoping my voice would clear it hasn't, and so I've taken the opportunity having a glass of whiskey and just cracking on. So if you like the sound of a slightly bluesy voice, that's great. If you don't, I'm really sorry, but whichever, which way I'm Paul. And this is the Mastering Portrait Photography podcast. So it's been a busy month or two. You can always tell when it's busy [00:01:00] 'cause the podcasts. Get, don't really get delivered in quite the pace I would like. However, it really has been a busy couple of weeks the past few. Let me, I'm gonna draw your attention to it. The past couple of weeks, we've, there's a ton of stuff going on around us for a moment. I was up in Preston. I've been up in Preston twice over the past couple of weeks. The first one was working as a qualifications judge for the BIPP, the British Institute Professional photographers. Um. Which I love judging. I love judging. It's exhausting, but I love it. And that was qualifications, panels. Then last week was the launch. Of the updated edition of Mastering Portrait Photography, the book, which is where it all started, where Sarah Plata and I published this book that seems to have been incredibly popular. 50,000 copies translated from English into four other languages. Chinese, Korean, German. And Italian, do not ask me, do not ask me the logic on why the book is in those [00:02:00] particular languages. To be fair, we only found out about the Chinese and Korean when we were trying to get some marketing material together to talk about the new book Nobody had told us. I'm not even sure the publisher knew, to be honest. Uh, but we have found copies. We have a Chinese copy here in the studio. I'm still trying to get a Korean version. So if you are listening to this. Podcast in Korea. Please tell me how to get hold of a version in Korean because we'd love to complete the set. There's, in fact, there's two Italian versions. We knew about that. There's a German version we knew about that hardback version. It's great. It's really beautiful. Very I, like I, I don't live in Germany and I don't like to stereotyping entire nation, but the quality of the book is incredible. It's absolutely rock solid, properly engineered. Love it. We have a Chinese version here but the Korean version still alludes us. However, this week the new version, mastering portrait photography is out. And as you know, I, Sarah interviewed me for the podcast last week to talk about it. Well, it's out. We've had our launch party, uh, we invited everybody who [00:03:00] has featured in the book who, everybody, every picture in the book that we asked the person in it to come to the studio for a soiree. And it was brilliant. I've never seen so much cheese in all my life, and by I don't mean my speech, I mean actual cheese. We had a pile of it, still eating it. So it's been a week and I'm still eating the cheese. I dunno quite how, well, quite by how much we vacated, but probably by several kilos. Which I'm enjoying thoroughly. I've put on so much weight this week, it's unreal, but I'm enjoying the cheese. And then on Sunday we had an open day where we had set the studio out with some pictures from the book and some notes of the different people. Who featured and what I might do, actually, I'd, I wonder if I can do a visual podcast. I might do a visual podcast where I talk about those images, at some point on the website, on masteringportraitportraitphotography.com. I will do the story and the ...
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    51 mins
  • EP167 The New Book Is Out!

    EP167 The New Book Is Out!
    Oct 24 2025
    Ten years, 50,000+ copies, four languages, and about a million stories later… the second edition of Mastering Portrait Photography is here. Sarah flips the mic and grills me about why we did a new edition, what changed (spoiler: basically everything but one image), how mirrorless and AI have shifted the craft, and why a tiny chapter on staying creative might be the most important two pages I’ve ever written. There’s a Westie called Dodi, a cover star called Dory, and a street scene in La Boca that still makes me grin. Enjoy! Links: Signed Copy of Mastering Portrait Photography, New Edition - https://masteringportraitphotography.com/resource/signed-copy-mastering-portrait-photography-new-edition/ Transcript: Sarah: So welcome back to the Mastering Portrait Photography podcast and today's a special one. Hi, I'm Sarah, and I'm the business partner of Paul at Paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk and also his wife too. Now, you might already know him as the voice behind this podcast, but today I'm gonna get the rare pleasure of turning the microphone around and asking him the questions. So Paul, it's been 10 years since the first edition of mastering portrait photography hit the shelves, and with selling over 50,000 copies, multiple reprints and translation into four languages, it's safe to say it's had a bit of an impact, but as we all know, photography doesn't stand still and neither do you. So today we're diving into the brand new second edition. So Hello Paul. Paul: Hello. It feels weird saying hello to my wife in a way that makes it sound like we've only just met. Sarah: Mm. Maybe, maybe. Paul: The ships that pass in the night. Sarah: Yes. So I thought we'd start with talking about the, the first version. You know, how did it come about? A bit of the origin story about it. Um, and I'll leave that with you. Paul: Well, of course Confusingly, it's co-authored with another Sarah, um, another photographer. And the photographer and brilliant writer called Sarah Plater, and she approached us actually, it wasn't my instigation, it was Sarah's, and she had written another book with another photographer on the Foundations of Photography. Very popular book. But she wanted to progress and had been approached by the publisher to create Mastering Portrait Photography. This thing that we now have become used to didn't exist 10 years ago, and when she approached us, it was because she needed someone who could demonstrate photographic techniques that would live up to the title, mastering portrait photography. And we were lucky enough to be that photographer. And so that first book was really a, a sort of trial and error process of Sarah sitting and interviewing me over and over and over and over and over, and talking about the techniques that photographers use in portraiture. Some of it very sort of over the sort of cursory look, some of it in depth, deep dives, but all of it focusing on how to get the very best out of your camera, your techniques, and the people in front of you. And that's how it came about. I mean, little did I know 10 years ago we'd be sitting here where we are with Mastering Portrait Photography as a brand in and of itself.This is the Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast Yes, because the book sold so well. Sarah: And did you expect it to do as well as it Paul : Oh, I'm a typical photographer, so, no, of course I didn't, you know, I kind of shrugged and thought it'd be all right. Um, and, and in some ways, because you have to boil it down into, I think there's a 176 pictures or there, there were in the first book or somewhere around there, a couple of hundred pages. There's this sense that there's no way you can describe everything you do in that short amount of space. And so instead of, and I think this is true of all creatives, instead of looking what we achieve. We look at the things we haven't done. And I talk about this on the podcast regularly, the insecurity, you know, how to, how to think like a scientist. That's something that will come up later when we talk about the new version of the book. But no, I, I thought it would be reasonably well accepted. I thought it was a beautiful book. I thought Sarah's words were brilliant. I thought she'd captured the, the processes that I was talking about in a way that clarified them because I'm not known for my clarity of thought. You know, you know, I am who I am, I'm a creative, um, and actually what happened was the minute it was launched, the feedback we got has been amazing. And of course then it's gone on to be translated into Italian. A couple of different Italian versions for National Geographic. It's been translated into Korean, it's been translated into German, it's been translated into Chinese. Um, and of course, technically it's been translated into American English. And, and one of the reviews that made me laugh, we've got amazing reviews on Amazon, but there is one that kind of made me laugh, but also upset me slightly, is that both ...
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    41 mins
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