Reply To: How Can I Improve? | You Are Not a Photographer

February 24, 2014 at 4:58 pm #17295

Participant

as a word of warning, the 135 is going to be unwieldy on a crop rebel body. Mostly because of the long focal length, the equivalent of 200mm is great for outdoor portraits where you have lots of space but for studio shooting it is usually too long even on a full frame camera. It is also going to be front heavy on the plastic rebel. A 50mm is going to be a lot more useful than a 135mm though an 85mm will probably look better than the 50mm option.

If you are shooting indoors you don’t really need a flash trigger, use the built in flash on the camera at the lowest flash exposure comp you can and set the flash to optical slave mode. Other option would be the very good yongnuo rf-603 triggers that go for about $30 for a pair. If you get more flashes there are the YN-560 III that have built in receivers to work with those triggers.

For using the flash on the camera a TTL flash is going to be a lot more useful, yongnuo make a couple of versions that vary in power and price and they work remarkably well considering what they cost.

From a photographic point though. You have a lot of tightly cropped portraits, it gets a bit in your face when you are looking at them all together. Try mixing it up more with less tightly cropped portraits and

Shots like this the focus is simply off, the focus is on her front sleeve and her eyes are soft. http://www.flickr.com/photos/116658164@N04/12640488123/

Some of your photos have very flat light in them and would benefit by some burning to bring a bit of shape into the photo.

The shot of the two kids suffer with flat light but also that the girl isn’t sharp. If you want to preserve the bokehness get your subjects further away from the background and stop down a little and it will look basically the same except you have sufficient depth of field to make it work. The skin tones are also off

You have nice and clean photos. Some I won’t comment on as they simply aren’t doing it for me, these are all the non portraits apart from the snake that is nice.