Reply To: Back for some cc

[nesgran]

Since it seems you will be doing more portraits than anything else I’ll concentrate on those (especially since I’m not very good at landscapes)

The two photos with the frames held, they aren’t really doing it for me. The frame holding is a bit clichéd and the guy just looks a bit awkward. Neither of the two photos are particularly sharp either, the photo of the two girls in particular so. In that shot the stiching on their chest is reasonably sharp but their eyes aren’t at all. What kind of light are you using in these photos? I see two round catchlights with a third tiny in the middle (two brollies over your shoulders and poop up flash for triggering?) but you still had to bump ISO to 400 at f2 which suggests to me there wasn’t a whole lot of light being thrown out from your light setup. To make these two better I’d ditch the frames and get them to stand a bit more naturally, get them to take a step or two forwards, close the aperture down to f2.8-4 to get a little more of them in focus and to allow for more mistakes on your behalf when it comes to focussing. If at all possible, a light for the background would be good as the background is now darker and the yellow walls look quite dirty.

Girl looking out of the window: not bad but there is still room for some improvement. First off I’d use a slightly longer focal length as her left cheek now looks bigger and her face goes a little chubby. Focus could probably be slightly more back (in a perfect world) to get the whole facing eye in focus. There are quite a lot of chromatic aberrations around her far eye which would be fairly easy to get rid of in lightroom for example. Main problem though is the yellow roof in the background that seems to grow out of her far cheek.

The colour run ones, there isn’t much to do about harsh sunlight unless you can get them under some kind of shade. Be careful with the colour stuff though as it will get into your lenses and it won’t ever come out again.

The fashion show ones: Girl with turquoise/brown dress, her face is too soft to be usable (again boob seeking af), girl with flowers in her hair you could have probably pulled back the highlights a little as the light is good for darker skin. The pose looks awkward and you’ve cut her arms off in a weird way, same with the shot before. The backgrounds for all these have lots and lots of single pixels of bright colours, I’d just get of them with some aggressive noise reduction in the background. Focus needs to be on their eyes in general rather than the middle of them as in these shots, it is less of a problem for guys but the better endowed ladies don’t get sharp eyes. Because you are sitting below them the plane of focus is going to be slicing them at an angle so make sure you get the important parts in focus.

Bunny girl should have been shot so you got the whole of her hands in the picture with less space above the ears

Girl by apple trees, this just looks awkward, get rid of it completely. There is also sensor dust showing

You’re doing well but you need to practice a bit more, especially when it comes to keeping the right parts of the people in focus. A shot doesn’t have to be super sharp in 100% view but when you can see it from the fairly small flickr thumbnails it is too soft (generally). As nice as it is to stare at a chest it shouldn’t be what your eyes are drawn to 🙂