Alright let me have it, give it to me straight doc

[nicholmikey]

This is the first time I photographed people for money, my very first clients. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikenichols/sets/72157636563727244/

 

I can’t tell if they are good or bad since they are my own photos, and no way my friends would tell me if they are bad. So give it to me straight.

[tealgreen1985]

I think overall they look really nice. The only critique I have is to watch your crops weather it be in the camera or in post. A lot of the photos the family takes up the whole frame while it doesn’t necessarily look bad it makes it harder for prints. You cant crop those down to an 8×10 frame with out loosing body parts.  Just keep that in mind in the future its always better to have more space around them. Good job, they look great! Nice and sharp and I love the fall tones 🙂

[nicholmikey]

I never thought about that, I have always heard the term “Fill the frame” so I tried to get it tight on the subjects. Luckily these are all cropped in lightroom so I can just pull it back a bit. Is there a rule for how much space to leave for framing?

[tealgreen1985]

I am not sure if there is really a rule… I usually make sure that there is room to crop to 8×10 since that is a popular size and it is very different then a 5×7  and if you ever end up doing gallery wraps you will need space around the edge otherwise some ones forehead will be folded around the edge. Images right out of the camera with no crop done print perfectly as a 4×6 then a 5×7 crops a little bit but not super noticeable but a 8×10 is a whole lot different. Its almost square compared to the other 2. How you crop your photos in post isn’t a huge deal if you sell prints because then you know you can go back in and fix what you need to fix before you send it to the printers. If you sell digital copies on a disk however you have to realize that a client 9 times out of 10 are not going to realize that the crop for different size prints is sometimes drastically different and they aren’t going to be too happy with their cropped of arms and ears. I just run my crop tool in photoshop and click on the different sizes and make sure everything fits in all the crop sizes before I save my completed images, I don’t use lightroom but I am sure there is something similar 🙂  Sorry if that was long and I hope it makes sense, its late and I am packing for a 3 month trip with a 2 year old in only 2 suit cases lol

 

[nesgran]

In lightroom there is a great feature where you can select overlays. One of the overlay categories is different crop formats, I’ve got mine set up so I see the framing of 5×7, 8×10 and 1×1 when I cycle through that overlay

[Bill]

Not too bad.  You already know but I will re-state it here, some of the crops are not all that great, but if you did them in LR, then you should be fine.

As for filling the frame, it’s a guideline for making you utilize most of the image area with your subject, it works well with portraits. You don’t always have to follow the “Rule”, it all depends on subject matter, style and type of shoot. The last thing you want to do though is take a photo of someone and have to crop away 75% of the image because they are too far away for example. You lose details and amplify all of the little mistakes by doing that.
The object is to make your photos look their best as well as the people or subjects in them.

The only major thing I saw and it is like a pet peeve with me, is your color. I took these 3 images to show you an example. If you notice, the color for these 3 images is way off from one another. Individually, they probably look fine, but together, you really start to see the variance in color.
If you are using LR, adjust one and sync the other 2 to the edited one to see how the look then.

Otherwise, I think they look okay to me.

[cameraclicker]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikenichols/10150066344/in/set-72157636563727244/

What happened to her left hand?

[nicholmikey]

That’s a good catch. I updated that on 500px and on my site but I guess lightroom did not update flickr properly. It does not have any items queued for an update so I don’t know how it was missed. Just a rouge brush.

[Author]

Posts