Critique my photos

Monicasweis · Aug 25, 2014

Hello
My name is Monica and I brand new to this forum just joined today.
If a few of you could critique my photos please that would be great. I'm just starting out and I do not have a website yet but I do have a Facebook page.
Https://www.facebook.com/MonicaSweisPhotography

I don't have that many pictures yet and my equipment is not the best.
I currently own a Nikond3100 with a standard len.
I will be purchasing something better soon.

Thanks in advance
Monica

ronlane · Aug 25, 2014

Welcome to the forum Monica.

You will get more results if you will post your photos on here instead of posting a link. I did click and what I saw was a pretty good start.

Derrel · Aug 25, 2014

I looked at what you have there. I would say that as a Facebook location portrait shooter, what little you have on your FB page is better than what many similar shooters have, and also at the same time, not as good as what many similar shooters have. There are simply NOT very many images to evaluate, and I see some good things, and somebad things, like the second image of the girl in the aqua top...she's well out of focus in that frame, no two ways about it. That should not be shown. The slightly older girl, the "main" gallery, has some good things in it, and some not so good things. While I do like the brick background shots, I think those would look much better if the girls were positioned farther in front of the background, and the background rendered more subtly and more OOF; as shot, the bricks are "part of the pose". Which, I guess could be argued is itself a look, a way of posing; sometimes I think it *is* a good idea to have the subject actually touching the background wall, especially if they can create a shadow that caused a 3-D effect to appear.

You are doing "okay" with the artificial focus blurring, but even when blurring, it's important to try and avoid accidental figure/ground attachment, which is what one gets when a strong background [aka ground] element appears to merge with the figure in the forefront; there are two in there, one with the tall grasses, another with a 12-15 inch diameter tree that goes right into the girl's head. As far as the Facebook images themselves: they need to be LARGER. Try 2,048 pixels, sharpened for Screen, standard degree of sharpening, and your FB images will look MUCH better and less-compressed and less-fuzzy. The pictures themselves appear VERY badly-compressed; perhaps you are uploading full-sized, straight out of camera images to FB, or are not clicking the High Quality upload option when uploading to the FB gallery?

I thought what you did best was age-appropriate poses, SIMPLE compositions, and you used no dumb, gimmicky props or poses, and your photos all had fairly simple backgrounds that had minimal impact on the girls (except for the figure/ground merges mentioned above). Your photos appear fairly "clean and simple", which is the better than many FB artist aspect I mentioned. Overall, I see more good than bad in these!

Monicasweis · Aug 25, 2014

Thanks Ron,
Not sure what I'm doning wrong but not able to post pics here

Monicasweis · Aug 25, 2014

Thank you Derrel,
Yes I agree the blurring is me playing with photoshop, im still a newbee and leaning to work it.
I just purchased a better lens that does apature as low as 1.8 so hopefully it will give me some better quality pictures.
Also thanks for the uploading tip i think I wasn't checking does boxes so the pictures don't look that good.

ronlane · Aug 25, 2014

Monicasweis said:
Thank you Derrel,
Yes I agree the blurring is me playing with photoshop, im still a newbee and leaning to work it.
I just purchased a better lens that does apature as low as 1.8 so hopefully it will give me some better quality pictures.
Also thanks for the uploading tip i think I wasn't checking does boxes so the pictures don't look that good.

There is a ton of stuff on youtube about editing photos using photoshop. They will help you to learn more about it.

CameraClicker · Aug 25, 2014

I see some white balance issues. Some focus issues. I think you should stay away from post production blur because it looks fake unless done very well. Flash would help some of your shots.

Comfortable models in reasonable poses is a good thing.

For critique, Flickr would be a better platform because you can upload large files and we can see them at the large size, also, include EXIF data, Flickr will show us that. It helps in figuring out many issues.