Thinking of your portrait subjects, even in the most formal portrait setting, as "modelling" is starting at the wrong end. Personally, I'd like to see the word

Thinking of your portrait subjects, even in the most formal portrait setting, as "modelling" is starting at the wrong end. Personally, I'd like to see the word model eradicated from the ordinary photographer's vocabulary; we have had the perfectly good subject and sitter to work with for longer than we've had photography. A model is just that — a stand-in for a "real" person (or persona). It's a job that people can be good or bad at, and when we think of our "real people" subjects as models, we immediately expect too much of them. The root portray in the word portrait, on the other hand, is one we should pay more attention to. As photographic portraitists, we don't have the luxury of creating an expression that represents the essence of the subject from a (relatively) long period of observation; we need to elicit and capture a person's natural expression (sometimes one that fits a target portrayal) under conditions that are anything but natural. That's people skills, not camera or lighting skills, and those skills can be learned. (If you want a quick but not-so-cheap lesson in basic technique, it might be worth checking out Peter Hurley's video The Art Behind the Headshot. As a photographic technician, he's merely competent, but he's good at waking people up and making them themselves.)