Reply To: Please Critique

[nesgran]

I think it is good you have a friend who can be honest with you.

I would still say you have some learning to do still about the basics unfortunately. Your selection of photos has issues if we start with the wedding part of the portfolio:

I see a lot of misuse of negative space. This is one of the fundamentals of composing shots. For example, the shot of the kid in white shirt would have looked a lot better if he’d been far more to the right in the frame, rule of thirds could successfully have been applied here. Other options would have been portrait orientation or a tighter crop. A fair few of them have empty space over the subjects which doesn’t look good at all.

You are not particularly selective when choosing photos either, the picture of the couple kissing against the burnt out background is unfortunately hideous given the level of noise and worse, banding noise. I’m assuming you wildly underexposed their heads and pulled it up in post. The finger with ring looks bad as well given the level of noise.

The posed shots are in direct sunlight which is never a good idea. When shooting weddings you will obviously often not have any option when it comes to time of day but consider shooting the posed shots at a later time. You can steal the couple and immediate family away as the sun is starting to set giving you a much softer light. If you do have to shoot in the middle of the day find a shaded spot and bring a reflector or speedlight to bring back some interesting directional light. The shot of the brides maids could have benefited from some extra light as it is now very flat and uninteresting.

The bride outdoors with flowers, you are missing bits of her. She is also far too contrasty. In the bin it should go.

Your sepia and selective colour screams fauxtog, give them back to us in colour. I think the flowers shot would be your strongest out of that entire set if it wasn’t selectively coloured.

Your posing will need some work as well. The bride outdoors with the bunched fabric around the waist now looks even bigger than she is. The bride indoors with the random bouquet dumped on her (why?) looks like she has rolls of back fat on account of the light coming from above and she being twisted over as she is. All women, no matter how thin, will get rolls on their backs or stomachs unless you get them to straighten out. The light in this case is only making it worse.

Are you using the camera in auto or P mode, is it a crop sensor camera? Reason I’m wondering is because your outdoor shots have a monstrous depth of field that does nothing to make your subjects stand out. Between this and the weird smoothing going on in a few of them I would almost think they were shot on a phone and not a higher end DSLR (are you shooting with a camera better than a rebel?). The bokeh on the only shot where you can see it (sepia wedding one) the bokeh is jittery and doesn’t help to draw focus to the people.

All of the above applies to your senior photos with the added problem that only one of your photos in that set has focus nailed. The rest are soft beyond salvage.

Same with family photos except the baby is creeping me out, it looks like it is dead.

Given all this you can probably tell my opinion about where you stand on charging customers.