What bottlenecks will portrait photography encounter?

Many photographers learn photography at different stages, and always feel that they can't move forward and break through their own bottlenecks. Whether it is technology, concept or emotion, these bottlenecks will always appear repeatedly on the road of playing photography.

For friends who just learn photography, it is a technical bottleneck to understand the complex operation interface of SLR cameras and be familiar with the relationship among aperture, shutter, ISO and exposure. At the same time, we have to face the problems of focus, balance, proportion, symmetry, sense of space and basic aesthetic feeling, which is another bottleneck faced by beginners.

Then with more and more shooting times, I gradually understand the relationship between aperture, shutter and ISO, and then I face a technical bottleneck. After each shoot, I go home to process the photos. Why do other people's photos look good? How do they adapt to this tone? What tone should I use?

When you have mastered the technical level, when a photographer enters the later stage of creation and faces the bottleneck of conception, he often sighs: Why can others shoot such an atmosphere but not himself? Why didn't the photos I took form my own style?

However, the real bottleneck is how to take a good photo that is worth remembering for a lifetime and remember your emotional relationship. One day, when you accidentally opened the photo you took, you suddenly realized: I photographed this girl. How's she doing? Does she still like the photos I took for her? Will these photos help to change her life?

Technical bottlenecks, conceptual bottlenecks and emotional bottlenecks are constantly appearing and coexisting in the process of learning photography. They will always haunt us and accompany us with every difficult progress. Sometimes they seem as insurmountable as a gap, but once you go forward bravely, you will see more scenery.

In the digital age, image processing has been inseparable from photography. Proper image processing can make up for some defects that photography can't solve, such as removing passers-by who are eyesore or liquefying skin for models. However, excessive post-processing makes the photo become a real thing, not a pure photographic work.

Although both image creation and photographic works are creations that express the photographer's thoughts, there is no right or wrong, but just as we often confuse photography with photography, I personally think that the essence of photography is to seek truth and record the world we see and the atmosphere we feel at the moment we press the shutter. Therefore, for the later stage, it is still necessary to remain true in the rough, rather than from scratch.