Hi Vince, welcome to the forum.
Hmm, some tips I can think of - bear in mind I'm only half a step above "novice" myself. Please pardon me if I'm giving you tips that are too basic, I don't know your background, I'm just guessing and inferring based on the gear you listed (which is perfectly adequate for the job, if you use it right)
Focus on the eyes and eyelashes! In portraits, this is absolutely critical. Pick your focus point and adjust your composition so it's focusing right on the eyelashes. Or, focus-and-recompose.
For outdoor shooting, go in the very early morning or in the late afternoon/early evening to make the best use of ambient light. Don't shoot everything in direct sun if you can help it, especially the harsh overhead midday sun (e.g. 10a-4p or so). It takes a lot of practice and skill to get direct-sun portraits to look good - you'll have hard shadows, squinty eyes, etc. Get the subject into full shade, then if you need a little extra light to balance the exposure, use your flash to fill in a little. On the other hand, don't be afraid to shoot a handful in direct sun - e.g. shoot into the evening sun to make your subject a hazy silhouette.
Get the flash off the camera if you can - either with a ETTL cable or with a radio trigger (Yongnuo makes some that are inexpensive and highly regarded). If you can't get the flash off the camera, you'll want to bounce it, if at all possible. Direct light from the hotshoe flash to the face will create flat lighting and hard, unflattering facial shadows, even if you have a plastic diffuser on it.
If you're not familiar with bouncing a flash .. well, a bit of searching and googling will probably give a better explanation than what I can give here. In short, a larger light source gives a softer, more pleasant shadow on your subject. That's why pros use softboxes and umbrellas and such, instead of the little 1"x2" flash head on the Speedlite. However, by pointing the flash head at the wall or ceiling, you effectively turn the whole wall into a light source, so you get a very large light source that gives soft, flattering, pleasing shadows on the subject's face. This is tougher to do if you're shooting outdoors - you can't really bounce off the sky. But, if you stand with a white building to your back, you can pivot the flash head around so it fires over your shoulder and bounces back onto the subject.
Use the right aperture to make the portrait look good. Some folks like to shoot with the lens wide open for a very thin DOF - this is fine for a FEW creative shots, but not for everything in the shoot. Pick the right aperture for your subject and the distance to your subject. For head-and-shoulders portraits on a 50mm lens, you're looking at something like f/5.6-f11 to get the face and hair in focus while still allowing for some background blue, if desired. If you open it all the way up to f/1.8 for a facial portrait, you'll get the eyes in focus but the hair and the tip of the nose will be out of focus. For fuller-length shots, you can use a smaller aperture and still get the same depth of field on your subject, since your subject will be farther away from the camera.
Get the camera off auto mode and expose for your subject, NOT for the entire frame. For instance, if your subject is against a white wall, the camera (in auto mode) will take that large white expanse into account, and underexpose the shot so that the total frame is what it thinks it's correct. In this case, your subject will be way too dark! Better to expose correctly for your subject's face, even though the light meter and histogram will show it as overexposed, since it sees all that white from the wall. Spot metering mode may help with this.
Depending on your processing software, shoot in raw, or raw+jpeg. That will give you way more leeway in making corrections later, just in case your favorite shots aren't the nest from a technical standpoint. Photoshop, Lightroom, and Aperture all will handle raw files just fine.
Take lots of shots, and don't be afraid to delete the ones that you don't like. They'll probably only want a half-dozen or so for prints and announcements and such, so if you take a hundred shots, you're bound to get enough keepers.
If you can get it right with your camera and lens and light, you won't need a lot of post-processing to make the subjects look good.
for business stuff
