[ebi]

what exactly are you trying to do here? How do you want to light this kid? Why is the background so black? I don’t get it.

[ebi]

Finally, someone who has the common decency to edit better.

Love these two: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lceymil/8595285011/in/set-72157633064585794

But other than that it’s just a lot of snapshots. But snapshots aren’t really a bad thing. I really like what this guy does: http://www.galharpaz.com/theo-roids and he actually shoots  polaroid film so you can get a feel for what it looks like in different lighting situations since you seem to like that vintage-y feel.

Let the shadows go a little more dark. They are unnaturally open too much. I prefer the b&w over the color stuff as well.

[ebi]

agreed with you and everyone else. I’d stop before you fuck up someones wedding and start assisting  with a pro. Someone who’s work you respect btw and make sure they pay you. They can pay you less if you are going into it to learn but they should pay you nonetheless.

[ebi]

it is so overwhelmingly mediocre, i don’t even know where to begin. If you’ve been following some of the other stuff I’ve posted you’ll find that I prefer a better presentation of the work before i’ll go into any detail. Baby steps.

[ebi]

EMF –

I’m ADD so I have a tendency to get stuck on the details and that frustrates me. Karen lacks attention to detail. And you get this from the very beginning.

– Unintelligible logo. It’s like a weird butterfly thing. It makes no sense and has absolutely nothing to do with photography. pointless.
– Bad web site design
– Galleries with way too much information. No concise editing
– Flat images, weird exposure things going on. I’m not even certain she knows how to use her camera
– the watermark and caring about trivial things like ppl stealing her low rez images.
– overall bad representation and presentation of imagery.

Some of these concerns I brought up in my original comment. She disregarded it as mean.  It was clear from the beginning she wasn’t interested in getting clear and concise advice, which is what I offered. I wasn’t being mean, I was being matter-of-fact. She snapped at me, I snapped back harder. I have no patience for people who don’t want to learn.

You’ll notice that my tone really wasn’t any different with the other people that I’ve responded to, with the exception that I like some of their work. The long and short of it is that I don’t care for Karen’s work.

[ebi]

I am preparing to relocate and will not be doing any photography except personal for the next 6 months to a year. 

And it is here that you answer your own question. Yes, you are a fauxtog.  I don’t think you are as thick skinned as you claim to be.

[ebi]

She’s not just starting out. She markets herself as a professional photographer…as an artist…and I think this site was pretty much born out of the frustration of people who call themselves artists but are completely clueless about their ability.

In the real world, people aren’t that nice and it would benefit OP to be as critical and mean about her own work as I am about it. Consider it tough love. I do want her to be better. I just have a weird way of showing it.  Midwest-Mom’s Down home Portraiture is typically shit and I don’t see any reason to beat around the bush on that. OP is no exception. AND like i said before, she opts for quantity over quality. I would prefer someone tearing my work to shreds over sugar coating it any day. That is what has made me a better photographer over the years. In the real world, you just don’t get asked back.

[ebi]

i’ll rephrase the pretty boy and pretty girl thing and simply say you need to fine people with interesting looks. Just b/c they are pretty doesn’t necessarily mean that have a great style. So focus on that.

[ebi]

A quick look at your tumblr says you have some raw talent. Moving over to your facebook page tells a different story. You have so much stuff on there that it’s just waters down the good. You need to delete every image on there, go through your stuff and find just a few good images from each session that work. You should start thinking of images in different looks. So skinny boy walking through a field is one look. if you’ve got other images of him in different situations, a close up portrait, that could be another look. I don’t need to see 10 different photos with different color temperature variations and black and white. I just need to see one good image. ONE, not two, not three, just ONE. Your best image and that is it.

So:
– Choose your best image
– get rid of all the horseplay. So get rid of all the shots of your coffee cups and weird self portrait vignettes with logo designs and flower shots and random instagram snaps and focus. You can use tumblr or some other service for the random shit, but your facebook page that says FIRST NAME LAST NAME PHOTOGRAPHY should be a concise representation about what you do.
-organize your shit. Portraits together, scenic shots together, you can even have a place for random instagram stuff, but again, keep it concise.
-stop charging $50 for senior portraits, approach the pretty boys and pretty girls in your school and offer to do their photos for free. Photos of your friends are nice, but you need to be more selective about the people you use in your portfolio. I have tons of shots of portraits that I got paid for, but they aren’t in my portfolio because they don’t really look all that great.

Do all this and then come back and we can take a more serious look at your work and give you a better critique. But I’m not going to sort through this mess b/c I have no idea what kind of photographer you are with all this clutter.

[ebi]

Also, and I’m just speculating here, that the unoriginality comes from the fact that OP charges very little for her services, which she should, so she has to work on volume to make a decent living. So she leaves very little time for creativity opting more for short studio sessions and pushing people out the door to turn a profit. I do occasional senior portrait work for family and of course, i don’t charge, but i still spend about 2 days working on a series of photos for them. They probably have far better senior portraits than anyone else in their class b/c they all go to the same family portrait studio and get the same shots.

[ebi]

well obviously she thinks that they suck too because she removed all but one public album, but still managed to leave up like 10 images of that sunflower shot all of which are horribly flat. And then there is a annoying watermark. The giant shoes shot is just kind of meh…And you’re right cameraclicker, those who don’t know any better will be happy with her work, but that doesn’t make it good by any stretch of the imagination. And even if she improves on a technical level, it won’t help the fact that her photos are just unoriginal drivel.

[ebi]

EMF – you are absolutely right. I’ll direct you all to here: http://www.karenleighphotography.com/
Everything on there sucks.

[ebi]

oh, constructive criticism? Sorry. Go back to whatever you did before taking photos. You were probably better at that then this. If not, sorry to hear that.

That is about as constructive as it gets. Again, truth…sorry it hurts.

[ebi]

I can tell you my experience. I went to school in a small town in Ohio. Started out working on a business degree, moved to a graphic design degree, then moved to my main campus (also a small town). Graduated with both the business and Graphic design degree, promptly moved to nyc and started assisting for about 8 years. I now shoot freelance and no longer assist. I had to call it quits with assisting as it was interfering with my ability to take jobs. The decision was lucrative. I work less but make more per day. Assisting rate for someone like me was around $400-500 a day and if I got 4 days a week I was making $1600 a week. As a photographer, if I book 4 days a month, make around $15,000 to $20,000. Sometimes I book more, sometimes I book less. Sometimes I get paid more per day, per project, sometimes I make less. Right now, I’m working on a travel project for a well known travel website that pays about $2500 for about 3 days of work. It’s much lower than most, because it’s editorial,  but its fun, will be a great addition to my portfolio and comes with some really great contacts. But I have the flexibility to always be working on my portfolio and taking care of the business end of things as well as networking – which is the single most important aspect of this job.

My 8 years of assisting has been invaluable. I learned from some of the best photographers. And even if they weren’t the best they were always working. I traveled immensely all over the world, shot when I could, and met some amazing industry people many of which I still work with today.

As far as East Coast/West Coast. It really depends. I think you should figure out which coast you like better. But it really has to be NYC or LA, maybe Miami. If it’s fashion you are into, then it’s most likely NYC. If it’s celebrity, it is incredibly difficult (unless you want to be paparazzi, gasp), but you should be in LA.

I live in Brooklyn and there is nothing questionable about it. Even the Pratt area is much better than when I moved here almost a decade ago. Everything is getting gentrified. I’ve never been in a questionable situation here. So you can put that thought to rest.

No worries about all the questions. I’m glad I can help. I wish I had the internet when I was your age to figure this out…i’m not that old BTW…lol

Now for some technical stuff, since you have some questions about that. I can point you in the right direction for some tools that will help for skin tones and color.

Monitor: Are you using a mac? If so, then you are half way there. Mac monitor suck for color but you can get yourself a colorimeter to help. I’d go Spyder for cost (approx. $49). Seems expensive but my color calibrator is $1500. Spyder is a good place to start. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=753569&is=REG&A=details&Q=

You also should get yourself a simple gray card. Like this one: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/529527-REG/Digital_Image_Flow_DGK_2_Digital_Grey_Kard_Premium.html

I have a macbeth color checker which costs about $200.  Btw, if you haven’t figured this out, photography is expensive.  You can get the cheap version for now. You are just looking for a simple starting point for color. You can click this as your gray point in editing software (I like Capture One Pro or Lightroom) and it automatically sets your gray point. You can adjust color temperature (yellow to blue) and tint (green to magenta). I like lightroom because it allows you to do split toning so you can add a little yellow to your highlights and blue to your shadows, if you like that kind of thing. C1Pro doesn’t make this so easy.

Backing up a bit, if you are on a PC, then that kind of sucks b/c PC’s are shit for photography. That said, I know many big companies that still use PC’s, much to my dismay. All the same software applies, but i would look at investing in a slightly better monitor. Something like this NEC on the low end ($750): http://www.necdisplay.com/p/desktop-monitors/p241w-bk For reference. I have a 27″ EIZO monitor which set me back about $3000.

Once you have all this, you are set for color. Now all you have to do is get your exposure right in camera. luckily, cameras have quite some range so you don’t have to be exact but it would be best to know what exposures work in what situations. Full Sun at 100ISO (canon cameras you should set to 160ISO as that is native, but we will stick to 100ISO). Full sun at 100ISo – 100 f/16  It’s the sunny 16 rule, which I see has a wikipedia page after googling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunny_16_rule

OR you could just set your camera to AV (aperture priority) and think less about the light and more about what depth. I like to do this when I want to shoot at F/8. take a shot, see how it looks, then go to manual and make adjustments. So if I get 500 F/8 and it’s too bright, I go to manual, stay at F/8 and bring the shutter speed down to 640.

But of course none of this applies to me b/c I NEVER shoot in full sun. Usually I’ll shoot backlit or in the shade. Just my style.

Confused yet?

lets talk a little more about color. Back in the day (before my day) the fashion industry was really into pinkish skin tones. now they like warm and sometimes they like very neutral or very blue skin tones, which I think looks bad, but hey, whatever is your cup of tea. You’ll have to find a style and try to stick to it. I like warmish skin tones – slightly warm from neutral.  The photo that jackd put up: http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/7816/c4rg.jpg is a little too yellow for my taste and perhaps a bit too contrasty. The blacks are too heavy. The whites are too white. Here’s the problem with this on a technical level. If these images were to be printed, the printer would not lay down any ink in the cheeks or the hands. which means that you’ll have big blotches of just paper and no ink in place of those two things.  The same is true with your original. Skin tones need to not lead in the reds more than about 238 (from a total of 255). 255 is pure white, but anything beyond 238 in red on a digital file and your printer doesn’t know what to do with it. You can adjust for this in post, but it just fills it in with red and you’ll end up with a red spot instead of a skin colored spot. It ends up looking pretty bad in print. This gets especially worse if you happen to be shooting for a magazine which has horrible pre press and prints on horrible stock (think toilet paper). All of a sudden your beautiful tear sheets that were going to go in your portfolio look horrendous and the magazine never hires you again. Film had excellent latitude and back in the day you ran test strips of film and could determine if you needed to push or pull the film depending on the test strip. But we aren’t in the film days anymore. We deal in a digital world and that means that these things as well as the horrid backlight situation which you are also dealing with creates lots of problems. Backlighting photographs looks great…if it’s film. If it’s digital, it’s not so nice. But it can be done. For one, you won’t really want to be shooting directly into the sun. And you’ll want to shoot slightly under. And that is the main lesson, I think, in this situation, is to shoot slightly underexposed, bring it up and post and then bring the whites back down. Hopefully (fingers crossed), there will still be enough detail in the image so that it doesn’t look so shitty backlit….hopefully. One can never tell with digital.

Still confused? Let’s move on. Everyone always wants to emulate Annie Leibovitz. I can’t stand her. Her reputation precedes her and that Vogue/Hurricane sandy cover story was one of the stupidest things i’ve ever seen in the fashion industry. And I’ve worked in fashion for a long time and seen some pretty stupid stuff (http://fashionisbullshit.com/2011/06/lv-elephant/)

Instead I’d like to direct your attention to some artist reps. Best to see some work from working photographers. Leibovitz tends to steal work from other artists on her roster if it interests her (she owns her own agency – http://www.artandcommerce.com/). And don’t just look at the photographers, look at hair and makeup too. It might turn you on to other photographers that might not be in the agency roster. Pin some stuff for reference. You have pinterest right?

http://www.art-dept.com/

http://www.jedroot.com/

http://beta.lebook.com/

http://www.ba-reps.com/

http://www.exposureny.com/

http://www.raybrownpro.com/

http://www.wschupfer.com/

 

Hope that helps and was not TL;DR.

 

[ebi]

rude? Nah, just truthful. Your work sucks. The truth is what you asked for. Lucky for you it appears that you live in a place where the people don’t know any better and you are probably a bargain.

[Author]

Posts