Most common PP for portraits?

[viridari]

Looking at my portrait shots, I think I had a white balance issue, as well in my latest bunch, but the color just looks so blah..

The first thing I notice is that they are completely washed out with light and there is no shadow.

I think with good use of flash, you diminish shadow, or even enhance the image through manipulation of shadow through lighting technique.

This is a hastily done example, but with just one strobe used creatively (off-camera) you can get good color and detail. I would do this image a little differently if I meant it to be a serious portrait but this was more or less just experimenting with using a single strobe to see how effective it could be for portraiture.

My main beef with that is that too much of her eye surface area is in shadow, and the eyes are how we connect with our subjects. Easily remedied.

This was another test shot, done with two lights. The lights are off to either side of the subject, not in front of the subject. Once could hardly say that the color or detail has been washed out of this.

I'd be interested in hearing more about how your lights are set up and what sort of exposure you're using.

 

[viridari]

I know the poses are terrible, but the girls were very uncooperative today.. So, aside from the poses and the background, how is the exposure, etc? I used my SB600 bounced off the ceiling, and for all the good that a 50 has, it forced me to get much too close, causing shadows to be cast..

Shadows are nothing to fear. It's just that in this case, the shadows cover the eyes. Soft shadows are OK but we need to be mindful of where they fall.

The exposure is better on this one. Don't be afraid to try getting up into 1/200 or 1/250 range which will let in even less ambient light, allowing the clean light from the flash to dominate.

If you can't take your flash off the camera, experiment with bouncing it sideways off of a nearby wall. You can use a piece of white poster board just out of frame on the other side of the subject as a reflector to reduce (but not eliminate!) the shadows.

 

[stsinner]

This is much better exposure wise. Did you use the other lights in this one?

Nope.. I had a window to the right of the girls (their right) but in the wall behind them, so it wasn't direct light, but light, nonetheless. And I had my SB600 in auto TTL mode at an angle (forward). The camera was in completely Manual mode, so I was happy to work my way to where I ended up.. I took about 30 pictures. Then I turned my flash off and the picture was completely black. I was just playing around at this point in order to learn. I knew the girls were tired of being photographed and wouldn't cooperate, so I just kept making adjustments.. The light being cast from the window I mentioned has a blue tint to it, because it's reflecting off the tar driveway outside, and the other room has translucent curtains covering the windows, so it was dark and challenging, but I stayed in Manual and just kept working with it. This is what I got. I know it has some exposure issues, but I can't put my finger on them.. Maybe you guys can help:

 

[stsinner]

viridari, one think I noticed about your portraits is how close you are, but you can't be in the subjects' faces with your camera, so do you take portraits with a zoom lens? I was using my 50 for detail, but maybe I should try with the 70-300 at about 100mm... Is that a good idea, or not?

Also, how did you avoid reflections on the glasses of that male subject? CPL?

 

[stsinner]

I'd be interested in hearing more about how your lights are set up and what sort of exposure you're using.

 

[viridari]

By "zoom" I think you mean "telephoto". A "zoom" lens is just one that can change focal lengths, but doesn't necessarily imply whether it is wide angle or telephoto or both.

I was using a 50mm lens on a Canon XTi, which is a cropped-sensor camera, so the effective focal length was 80mm. Yes, I was pretty close to my subjects.

You can get the same effect with 100mm just a little further back. The longer focal lengths will flatten the depth of the image, which could be a good or bad thing depending on what you're going for.

Glasses are tricky! The lighting setup that I described really avoided that. I almost never use flash directly from the camera. The headshot of the man was taken with two off-camera flashes. The one on camera-left was firing through a small white umbrella that was probably less than a foot from his face. This gives a really nice soft light.

The other one was on a stand at camera right and bouncing off of a reflective silver lined umbrella. This fills a wider area and would normally be considered a harder light given the greater distance, but it wasn't a very powerful light so you don't get much of that effect.

These lights were off to the sides of the subject, not in front of him, so the reflection off of the glass was oblique with respect to the camera lens. Someone standing off to the sides would have seen a strong glare. But looking straight-on at the subject, it's a nice clean shot.

It would have been better with a third light behind him as a "rim light" or "kicker" to help define his edges more crisply and set him off from the background more.

He was standing in a vacant parking deck. The flash was turned up high enough to drown out the poor color temperature of the overhead lighting. The short shutter speed also helped in squelching out the ambient light.

One of the best things you can do for your portraiture is get the flash off of the camera. http://strobist.com is a great resource for learning this stuff, and I highly suggest taking some time to sit down and read through the lessons there.

 

[viridari]

Well yeah I can read your EXIF, too. But I was referring more to your lighting, not your exposure settings. i.e. was sunlight coming in? What kind of ambient lighting was in the room and where was it coming from? How many flashes are in the room, where are they located, how high were they turned up, and what modifiers were used with them?

It looked kind of like a single flash on the camera pointing right at the subjects which is going to wash them out and not give you the warm kind of portraits that I think you're expecting.

 

[tsaraleksi]

The blue color is from the daylight itself-- it doesn't have anything to do with the pavement, it's simply a different color than the light produced by indoor light fixtures. Mixed light color is a big pain that can be tough to overcome, and is often really best beaten by using strobes/flashes (or just putting the image in black and white !) .

 

[viridari]

The blue color is from the daylight itself-- it doesn't have anything to do with the pavement, it's simply a different color than the light produced by indoor light fixtures. Mixed light color is a big pain that can be tough to overcome, and is often really best beaten by using strobes/flashes (or just putting the image in black and white !) .

Or take a reference shot with a grey card and the same lighting/exposure so that you can determine the best white balance settings for the grey card reference pic, and apply those same settings to the actual portrait.

 

[tsaraleksi]

Or take a reference shot with a grey card and the same lighting/exposure so that you can determine the best white balance settings for the grey card reference pic, and apply those same settings to the actual portrait.

This can help but if you have more than one color of light, then when you set the WB for one color, it will be wrong for the other. In theory a lot of post work can make a difference, by going in and spot correcting.

 

[viridari]

This can help but if you have more than one color of light, then when you set the WB for one color, it will be wrong for the other. In theory a lot of post work can make a difference, by going in and spot correcting.

Yeah I often work in areas with really really poor ambient lighting. My favorite way to deal with this honestly is just to try to overwhelm the subject with flash and leverage that in the exposure to squelch out the ambient light.

 

[stsinner]

Thank you both.. Lots of good advice and info.. Strobist seems to be a very popularly recommended site.. I've gone there several times, but evidently I need to read more..

 

[stsinner]

So I turned off the umbrella flashes and simply attached the LightSphere Cloud to see what I could get, and I switched to the 70-300.

What do you think of these pictures when looking at them critically:

Thanks for the info.

 

[tsaraleksi]

Your dropping your shutter speed again, which is why they've got red/orange creeping into the images like in the first ones you posted.

 

[Flower Child]

oh my goodness. i have learned so much from just looking at this post.

stsinner: that second one you did (on the first page) with them on the couch is much better