Katie G

[DGMPhotography]

C&C please!

1
2
3
4

 

[Vtec44]

Beautiful lighting and post process. IMHO however, her expression doesn't go with the poses.

 

[DGMPhotography]

Beautiful lighting and post process. IMHO however, her expression doesn't go with the poses.

Thanks! What would you suggest?

 

[Vtec44]

Thanks! What would you suggest?

It's hard to say since these are all non-verbal communication queues, and we interpret them differently.

For example on #2, her hand gesture communicates a soft feminine pose (I use that pose a lot too) but her facial expression looks forced. Plus the lighting is dramatic for the pose so although technically it's a beautiful photo, it's visually a bit confusing for me. I'm not sure if you did this intentionally as a test but that's just my observation. What if you try matching lighting, poses, and expression?

 

[DGMPhotography]

Thanks! What would you suggest?

It's hard to say since these are all non-verbal communication queues, and we interpret them differently.

For example on #2, her hand gesture communicates a soft feminine pose (I use that pose a lot too) but her facial expression looks forced. Plus the lighting is dramatic for the pose so although technically it's a beautiful photo, it's visually a bit confusing for me. I'm not sure if you did this intentionally as a test but that's just my observation. What if you try matching lighting, poses, and expression?

Hm, that's an interesting point you make. I will have to focus on that more so in other shoots.

 

[Rick50]

Not getting any of them.
I found this helpful but I'm no pro.
Amazon.com: Doug Box's Guide to Posing for Portrait Photographers (9781584282488): Douglas Allen Box: Books

 

[cherylynne1]

I just finished reading Roberto Valenzuela's "Picture Perfect Posing," and it was incredibly helpful. Though I agree, it's the expression more than her pose that isn't working. She looks like she's saying "Ugh...." I would know...I have that look all the time.

 

[manaheim]

Err.... those seem a little odd to me. Weird facial expressions. Peculiar lighting choices.

 

[DanOstergren]

I like your lighting. I think your skin editing is waaaay overdone though. I would pull it back about 80%.

 

[Orange Elephant]

She's an interesting looking girl. I agree with Dan that the skin is over done, more specifically the face. Did you use Portrait Pro for this? The poses look a little too... posed in my opinion. Also, I think maybe the set was wrong for that particular girl? Perhaps soft studio glam doesn't suit her too well, perhaps outdoors on the street? Shot 2, her head is a bit distorted because of your angle. Shot 3, not sure why you left flare on her arm? Shot 4, just a bit of an old fashioned forced pose. Maybe process that particular shot to look like 1970's film? It may work like that.

 

[Studio7Four]

Some general observations of the set as a whole:
She doesn't have a typical model look, including her expression(s)...and that's okay with me. I think sometimes as photographers we get too caught up in what we would like the result to be, or what we read into someone else's photo, that we forget the sometimes it's just about the client/subject. You don't say whether this was shot for her or for your benefit, so I'm fine with the mixes of poses and expressions.

That being said, there are a few suggestions I can make about these shots. First, they all are cropped slightly differently, so they seem disjointed as a set. They are also cropped very tightly - give the poor girl some room to breathe! If these are for her as a client, she'll have a tough time framing them without cutting parts of herself off (or at the least making her look really boxed in). If these are for you, pick the aspect ratio you're working with for your portfolio and crop her to best fit that space. Sometimes that even means adding some dead space to the frame and dragging the background to fill it.

Also, while I don't mind the poses on their own merits, pay attention to how they work with your subject's body. In this case, shots 2-4 all have her left arm flat against her body. Particularly since her arms are bare, and this arm is very square to the camera, these poses make her upper arm look much flabbier than it does in shot 1. If you have her pull her elbow out just a touch, you can eliminate this flattening of her upper arm without changing the pose noticeably.

 

[DGMPhotography]

Some general observations of the set as a whole:
She doesn't have a typical model look, including her expression(s)...and that's okay with me. I think sometimes as photographers we get too caught up in what we would like the result to be, or what we read into someone else's photo, that we forget the sometimes it's just about the client/subject. You don't say whether this was shot for her or for your benefit, so I'm fine with the mixes of poses and expressions.

That being said, there are a few suggestions I can make about these shots. First, they all are cropped slightly differently, so they seem disjointed as a set. They are also cropped very tightly - give the poor girl some room to breathe! If these are for her as a client, she'll have a tough time framing them without cutting parts of herself off (or at the least making her look really boxed in). If these are for you, pick the aspect ratio you're working with for your portfolio and crop her to best fit that space. Sometimes that even means adding some dead space to the frame and dragging the background to fill it.

Also, while I don't mind the poses on their own merits, pay attention to how they work with your subject's body. In this case, shots 2-4 all have her left arm flat against her body. Particularly since her arms are bare, and this arm is very square to the camera, these poses make her upper arm look much flabbier than it does in shot 1. If you have her pull her elbow out just a touch, you can eliminate this flattening of her upper arm without changing the pose noticeably.

Good points, thank you!

But I'm a little confused about the cropping part. Am I supposed to have a certain aspect ratio for my portfolio?

 

[Studio7Four]

. Am I supposed to have a certain aspect ratio for my portfolio?

I wouldn't say you're supposed to, but there are some things worth keeping in mind. When it comes to a print portfolio, the portfolio looks better as a collection if the prints in it are all the same size. For example, the standard for a model's portfolio is 8"x10". Photographers' portfolios are traditionally 11"x14" (though that's flexible these days). That's not to say you couldn't go with 8x10 as well, but what you don't want to do is mix 8x10's (or 5x7's, etc) in with your 11x14's in an 11x14 portfolio. That's not to say that you have to force an image to be 11x14 just because that's the size portfolio you've bought - if it doesn't work at that, it doesn't work. If, for example, an image wants to have a square crop, you can play games like adding bands to the top/bottom or to the sides to get your image to print out at 11x14 so that the print fits your book.

I brought up consistency in the case of these four photos partly because each crop just seems unnecessarily tight on its own but also they are so different from each other that they don't work as a collection. (Note, this is not necessarily a bad thing if you're not intending to present them as a collection, or as part of a print portfolio.) An 8x10 crop has an aspect ratio of 0.8 (short side/long side). An 11x14 has an aspect ratio of ~0.786 (very close to an 8x10, so cropping for a model portfolio and for yours would give two very similar images). These four photos have ratios of .688, .592, .628, and .568 - a bit all over the place.

Now, I kept writing about print portfolio above. If you are presenting the image on its own, with custom matting and framing available, who cares what the aspect ratio is as long as it works for that image? Similarly, depending on how you have an online portfolio set up, the aspect ratios may not matter either. If you are presenting images or thumbnails in a grid, wildly varying aspect ratios are going to seem disjointed. But if your website is set up as a horizontal scroll and the images get resized to have the same vertical height (as mine is), it doesn't much matter what the horizontal width (and hence, the aspect ratio) is.

So no, there is no hard commandment about how to crop, just some things to keep in mind.

 

[DGMPhotography]

If you are presenting images or thumbnails in a grid, wildly varying aspect ratios are going to seem disjointed.

In that regard... Can you tell me what you think of my website?

 

[Studio7Four]

This is why I tried to throw in a bunch of hedge words before. On your website the various aspect ratios work. You've laid them out with an overall blocking scheme in mind, so even though you don't have strict rows and columns you do provide a sense of structure. The line width between images appears inconsistent here and there, and there is a place or two where the image height is off (so the bottom doesn't line up with its neighbors - look to the bottom right of "Wanderlust" on your fashion page), but I only noticed these details because I was really trying to pay attention since you asked for a critique. At a quicker, common-viewer glance it looks good to me.