Paulina Duczman
K-BASED, POLISH-BORN,
Paulina Duczman produces
elegant, timeless studio
portraits worthy of winning
the many international awards
that grace the walls of her
Ke t ter i n g s t ud io. Her rise to fame has been
fast – from her first photograph to her first
high-street studio was a mere 18 months – it’s
a story most aspiring portrait photographers
will read with envy and intrigue.
Three years since opening her
Northamptonshire studio and Paulina is
averaging £1,800 per session, has built a
steady stream of sold-out workshops and
won multiple awards for her work – but it’s
not this that sets her apart: it’s her style. With
echoes of Renaissance and Baroque Europe
portraiture, Paulina has developed a classical
appeal that has photographers wanting to
learn from her and families wanting to invest
in her – quite the feat considering five years
ago she’d never even held a camera.
“I started my business in October 2014
after a summer of photography. I’d bought
the cheapest bridge camera I could for a
family holiday and discovered what I’d
taken wasn’t half bad. Unfortunately my
three children weren’t very willing models
so I had to find other people on forums and
Facebook to practise on, which led to me
opening my Facebook business page and
developing a client base.
“When I started we converted a bedroom
in our house to a studio – if you can call it
that: I had the cheapest lamps I could find
from eBay and a backdrop. After a couple of
months, we decided to build an extension
for the studio as using the spare bedroom
wasn’t conducive to family life, but three
months after it was completed it was clear
I needed a high-street studio and here I am.
That was three years ago,” says Paulina.
With such a defined and refined style of
portraiture, you’d be forgiven for presuming
Paulina had a background in art – if her
whole-hearted embracement of Rembrandt
lighting is anything to go by. Or perhaps she
had fast-tracked her career by completing
courses to hone her social media andbusiness skills, but no. “I needed to get the
knowledge as quickly as possible so I studied
at night – in fact, in the beginning, I didn’t
even know what a DSLR was. I took as many
pictures as possible, taught myself
Photoshop in the evenings and posted
pictures online for comments asking other
photographers if I was going in the right
direction or not – that slowly defined what
I wanted do.
“I’ve always been pulled towards this
style of photography though, even in the
early days of my photography I was styling
clients in certain clothes and giving them
accessories to hold. Establishing my style of
portraiture was more about polishing my
pictures and getting the images right
in-camera than it was discovering my
visual preferences,” she adds.
Wit h t i me , Paulina has found a formula
for delivering consistent image quality and
aesthetics, in part by keeping her set-ups
simple. She has a few Nikon cameras – D5,
D800 and D810 – with two lenses: a Nikkor
58mm and 105mm; and uses one Profoto D286 Digital SLR Photography Ma y 2019