[nesgran]

Her attitude is the least of her problems…

[nesgran]

shame it was all a fake

[nesgran]

I’m surprised about the job ad given the clientele they have and the quality of most of the images. It might be a junior position shooting the dregs of the product photography world.

As for a experience with a MKIII, does a 1D MKIII count? 🙂

[nesgran]

A bit late to the party but the spambot above me threw this one in to the light again.

National union of journalists have a guide to free lancing but obviously the prices aren’t realistic in this scenario. http://www.londonfreelance.org/feesguide/index.php?&section=Photography&subsect=Online+use+of+photos

In a case like this, might it not be better to suggest you do a swap for time? It may well be that both of you come out better off having bartered services with each other instead of money changing hands. It depends on the blog a bit though. If it is one with 100k clicks a day I suggest you charge her according to the NUJ rates but otherwise you might find it beneficial not to. Could you business benefit from having a MUA and thus bring in more money that way?

[nesgran]

An 85mm is a good choice, another would be a 70-200 2.8 but that will be a little bit awkward on a crop camera but worth checking out. The older sigmas are decent and not very expensive but obviously no match optically for the nikon 85mm

[nesgran]

well played sir

[nesgran]

I’m guessing the sharpening was to bring out the texture of the skin for a harder look. You can get the look with duplicate layers and changing the blend mode. The super heavy vignette detracts from the image because you are darkening the forehead and the focal point of the image is now her nose.

This isn’t sharp, it should go in the bin

This isn’t very sharp, the noise is bad and his hair blends seamlessly in to the background making it look like he is a face floating

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127836299@N03/15639225390/in/photostream/

This one you could have used the negative space a bit better. As it stands now the girl is looking out of the picture. I would have preferred to have framed her on the other side of the photo so she was looking in to the photo instead. Some context could work as well, what is it that she is so focussed on outside the frame? The horizon is tilted as well

Here you’ve brought the over exposed outside back into the picture but it doesn’t look very good. The colour fringing you get from doing it isn’t worth it. Again a tilted photo. This one you could have made better by not including the outside. You have the great side light from the big windows going so a darker background would have helped bring your subject out more.

Not sure what you have done to the background here but it doesn’t look great with all the blotchiness. I would have preferred her to be on the other side of the middle looking that way

This photo would have benefited from a longer focal range and a deeper depth of field. Her eye is sharp as is his ear but his eyes aren’t

Here he is in focus but she isn’t. For these something like an 85mm lens would have been ideal. The background would have been blurred yet you could have had a deeper depth of field. With a short lens like a 35mm you will struggle to get both.

Not sharp, stick in bin

I like this shot, the leading lines work well and the colours complement. Advice would be to tell the people to walk really slowly towards you. Basically in slow motion. It makes getting focus easier but also prevents the motion blur you have on their feet. It isn’t a dynamic enough photo to really make use of the motion in it.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127836299@N03/16783002662/in/photostream/

Another one I like where the hair works with the background. Was it intentional or did it just happen to be so?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127836299@N03/16596707260/in/photostream/

This I could easily see in a clothes store on one of the walls

I think you are doing well. The photos aren’t perfect and you are limited by your gear but you’ve done well no matter. The portraits have good expressions, the colours are mostly there (some difference between various shots in the same album but no massive difference ) and you’ve made your subjects look good. My advice would be to cull the shots you have though, if they aren’t sharp and crisp get rid of them. At some point you need to expand your lens collection beyond the 35 1.8 which will make things a lot easier for you. You make good use of the natural light but you are at a stage where you ought to be learning how to augment it be it with reflectors or a bit of flash. Portraits with catch lights look a lot more alive that without.

[nesgran]

I unfortunately have to agree with CC that a business course will be far more useful than a photography one.

As for making money off your photography, nothing in that portfolio would have earnt you money. People are what pay you most often to take photos of them at occasions like weddings etc. Trying to find a gig photographing pets, piers at sunset etc are near impossible in the real world.

Your photos are nice enough but nothing that stands out or anything that I would expect you to manage to sell as prints. Technically your colours are off with far too much saturation. It is a bit difficult to see though as pinterest is an awful photo sharing platform and I can’t get rid of their box that wants me to log on one way or another.

In short, do a course in business and get your friends to pose for you for portraits. Spend some time with a photographer and get a feel whether you actually enjoy the working as a photographer. Remember that taking the photos is a minuscule part of your day. Computing will give you a job at the end if you stick with it, photography probably won’t. Besides, there is no reason why one has to exclude the other.

[nesgran]

People don’t know better and because everyone around them constantly tell them how awesome their pictures are they take your lone voice as someone who only wants to put them down.

I don’t know if you’ve ever watched Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen nightmares? Preferably the British and not the really dramatised American version. Lots of those people are as deluded as the fauxtographers we see on facebook but far more heavily invested into their business. They are almost always failing because they aren’t producing high enough quality, their business model isn’t up to scratch and they don’t know how to run a business. All these things probably sound familiar. Most of them don’t really want to accept that they are rubbish at what they do either. We need some angry photographer with a camera crew in tow to sort some of these fauxtographers out and hopefully some will fall in line and realise just how useless they are.

[nesgran]

Only £15k franchise fee! Bargain

[nesgran]

After looking through the shots, I think you are a little harsh on him. Now I don’t think he has any business running workshops but he seems a bit better than most of the fauxes out there. His subjects are, well, chavvy and he has no concept of proper white balance but on the whole it isn’t the train wreck we usually see on here. He is attempting off camera light, not very successfully mind you but he is experimenting at least and not proclaiming he is a strictly natural light photographer. I feel a bit sorry for the fat girl in the third shot, looks like the dress wasn’t made in her size and now it looks odd.

[nesgran]

It isn’t exactly news that photographers are not necessarily good businessmen. Just look at Magnum, back in the late 50’s you would have expected them to be swimming in cash with Robert Capa at the helm with people like HCB there? According to the book I’m reading at the moment Capa saved Magnum several times by borrowing $5000, throwing a massive party and getting $10000 in contracts from that party letting them live on. They’ve apparently never been financially sound and their corporate lawyer was working for free for essentially 30 years because he idolised them. Now if this is a collective of some of the best photographers the world has to offer imagine if you were just as rubbish at business but not a world famous photographer? Disaster.

Mini sessions are not what anyone wants to do but they pay the bills provided you can get enough of them. They can also lead on to further contracts in the future provided they like you. I don’t think it is a good idea to do mini sessions as your main source of income but to pay the bills, why not?

[nesgran]

When are you going to do something about this? It is killing the forum I think, not to mention giving viruses to those who are stupid enough to download “adobe flash player” which this site keeps redirecting me to. The fact that this very thread is full of spam which is more than six months old probably attests to the level of commitment from the admin.

[nesgran]

going from lightroom 3 to 5 is definitely worth it. The images will come out better and the new tools are very useful not to mention it will support your current camera

[nesgran]

I’ll agree with WCS, well done.

There are obviously some problems. Your colours seem all over the place with several that have a clear green hue. Are you using a colour calibrated monitor? If not this should be your first investment

Secondly, I would split the gallery between the cityscape type shots and the portraits. Imagine being a person out shopping for a photographer to shoot their kids bar mitzva/tenth birthday party/corporate event etc. Would they really want to sift through all those photos looking for examples of portraits?

Thirdly, the white vignettes should go. That is all have I to say on that topic

Keep it up but make sure you take on assisting jobs to learn more about the important bits about being a photographer, i.e. not the actual taking of photos. That is only a minor part of the key to running a successful business. Unless you are incredibly business savvy prepare to run in to problems and that fast. Oh, and pay your taxes and insurance.

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