A Friday

[Philligan]

I met up with a buddy today to take some pictures. He does portraits for a living, so I picked up a lot from him. :thumbup: Especially with portraiture. I'm really looking forward to getting an off-camera flash and a couple umbrella lights to start trying stuff out - it's a lot more fun than I was expecting. And using his D600 makes me really want a full frame.

Here are some cool shots I got of him. The whole album is here. It's all T3/1100D + 50mm f/1.4. C&C is always welcome.

A Friday - a set on Flickr



















I wasn't paying attention when I took this and shot it way overexposed, but I think it still came out pretty cool:

 

[TKD]

First the disclaimer. I am not a portrait photographer. Done a few, but not my favorite subject. There are several here that I really like. Composition and light are really nice.

 

[Philligan]

Thanks! What don't you like about the ones you don't like? Thanks especially for mentioning the composition, that's by far what I struggle with the most. I took a page from his book and stopped caring so much about the rule of thirds, and looked for ways to centre him and try and get a cool-looking background.

The biggest issue I had was getting home and finding out my camera hadn't focused like I thought it did. Pretty much, if not entirely, all the lighting was just because we happened to hit an awesome time of day. My favourite is the one of him standing with his camera, with all that crazy lens flair. There's too much flair for me, but it happens haha. I really dig pretty much everything about that picture. The exposure seems a bit off, but I was in all manual, so I can't complain. :thumbup:

 

[Ysarex]

Here's some considerations: get your camera off auto white balance.

Joe

 

[Philligan]

Noted. :thumbup: I usually leave it on auto and tweak it in Lightroom. Guess I skipped that one.

 

[Ysarex]

Noted. :thumbup: I usually leave it on auto and tweak it in Lightroom. Guess I skipped that one.

If you capture raw files and adjust WB later in LR that's fine, but auto WB in camera has a failure rate of 100%.

Joe

 

[Philligan]

These were all raw. I kind of wish I'd worried more about getting a constant look in my editing. I just did this picture-to-picture from scratch, and settled on what I thought suited each shot. Aside from composition, workflow is probably the biggest thing I need to work on.

 

[DiskoJoe]

I like the bw more than the color. I would say to watch your focus more then the wb at this point. The soft focus is an issue that LR cannot fix.

 

[Granddad]

If you capture raw files and adjust WB later in LR that's fine, but auto WB in camera has a failure rate of 100%.

Joe

I beg to differ. Auto WB works well for me on my D700. It is very rarely off and then not by more than a fraction... except in coloured stage lighting.

On workflow and consistency: If you are working on a set of images in LR in the same lighting conditions you can create your own preset and tweak individual shots from there.

 

[Ysarex]

If you capture raw files and adjust WB later in LR that's fine, but auto WB in camera has a failure rate of 100%.

Joe

I beg to differ. Auto WB works well for me on my D700. It is very rarely off and then not by more than a fraction... except in coloured stage lighting.

Well it failed pretty dramatically for the OP.

In the process of setting white balance we account for the color of the light source by using a pre-tested light source or measuring the color of the light source. We can measure the light source directly with a color temp meter or more commonly we can use a standard neutral reflectance target. I'm not aware of any other way to functionally measure the light source color accurately. If you can explain how your D700 manages that task without using one of those methods I just noted I'll retract my assertion.

As a further note: I'm in the unique position to be able to test pretty much all of the modern digital cameras. I teach on average 4 classes per year and at one time or another my students bring me most of what's out there. So although I do not own a Canon Rebel I've nonetheless used many dozens of them in every model. Likewise Nikon Dxxxx's and Dxxx's. I'm helping one of my students right now make up her mind between a D600/D610 and I just last week helped one of my students purchase her D5200. They all eventually end up in my hands and I get to see the results from all of them. All of my tests of all of those cameras empirically support my assertion. I will agree that auto white balance doesn't err as wildly as it used to (current algorithms have been helped a lot by pre-sampling methods), but it's still more a guess than a measurement.

Joe

 

[The_Traveler]

AFAIC, there is no such thing as 'cool' shots.

There are shot that are well composed, well exposed and well focused with a DOF that matches the desired center of interest.

From looking at the exif on these files, it seems that you don't have a good handle on the relationship between aperture, shutter speed and iso down well enough.

For example, the 5th picture looks badly underexposed with a tremendous amount of noise, much more than one would expect at iso 400 so I guess that you edited this from a very dark picture.

The exif from that shot are
0.001 sec (1/800)
Aperture f/2.8
Focal Length 50 mm
ISO Speed 400

Why are you shooting at 1/800 when you could be shooting at 1/200 and getting much more light on the subject?
If the shots are bad because you've made a mistake, don't post them, learn from them.

Look at your pictures first.

Are they in focus?
Are they well exposed?
Can you see detail where it's important?
Is there lots of space that doesn't do anything?

You have to learn to be critical of your own work.
Throwing up every shot, particularly shots that are dramatically underexposed and out of focus, means that you aren't judging your own work but expecting us to do it all for you.

 

[Granddad]

If you capture raw files and adjust WB later in LR that's fine, but auto WB in camera has a failure rate of 100%.

Joe

I beg to differ. Auto WB works well for me on my D700. It is very rarely off and then not by more than a fraction... except in coloured stage lighting.

Well it failed pretty dramatically for the OP.

In the process of setting white balance we account for the color of the light source by using a pre-tested light source or measuring the color of the light source. We can measure the light source directly with a color temp meter or more commonly we can use a standard neutral reflectance target. I'm not aware of any other way to functionally measure the light source color accurately. If you can explain how your D700 manages that task without using one of those methods I just noted I'll retract my assertion.

As a further note: I'm in the unique position to be able to test pretty much all of the modern digital cameras. I teach on average 4 classes per year and at one time or another my students bring me most of what's out there. So although I do not own a Canon Rebel I've nonetheless used many dozens of them in every model. Likewise Nikon Dxxxx's and Dxxx's. I'm helping one of my students right now make up her mind between a D600/D610 and I just last week helped one of my students purchase her D5200. They all eventually end up in my hands and I get to see the results from all of them. All of my tests of all of those cameras empirically support my assertion. I will agree that auto white balance doesn't err as wildly as it used to (current algorithms have been helped a lot by pre-sampling methods), but it's still more a guess than a measurement.

Joe

No need to withdraw your assertion. You're obviously way ahead of me on the tech side. I'm not withdrawing my assertion that auto WB works for me in my camera, either.
My adjustments to WB in lightroom are minimal and for what I shoot and the way I shoot I'm happy with that.

... Having said that I'd agree that it didn't do a great job for the OP.

 

[Philligan]

Throwing up every shot, particularly shots that are dramatically underexposed and out of focus, means that you aren't judging your own work but expecting us to do it all for you.

This was around a fifth of the shots I took that day, and also my first time using manual. But, lesson learned.

 

[Philligan]

I like the bw more than the color. I would say to watch your focus more then the wb at this point. The soft focus is an issue that LR cannot fix.

I think that was partly an issue with the surrounding focus points in my camera. A lot of them looked like they were focused on the LCD, and I found out otherwise in LR. I actually just switched it yesterday to use the centre point only, since I like focusing and recomposing anyway. But, it's easy to blame the camera.

 

[baturn]

#3 looks like he has a really cool camera like flask. Every one else covered everything else better than I could.