How to practise portrait lighting without a model
You don’t need a real-life model to hone your portrait photography skills. An inexpensive dressmaker’s mannequin head will happily sit quietly for hours…
There are many things you can photograph at home, but you can really only practise portraiture with somebody to sit for you - and hiring and being in close proximity to a model isn’t the best idea right now.
If you’re lucky, you might have a partner, family member or housemate willing to let you take some photos. But what if you don’t have someone under the same roof, or you don’t have someone willing to sit there for hours while you slowly perfect a range of different lighting setups?
You could always try self-portraits. However, to really learn how to use your lights and to see how their placement affects your subject, you need to be on the other side of the camera.
There is a solution, though - purchase a mannequin head. There is a vast number of different heads available online, with eBay and Amazon being the best places to start looking.