First attempt at portraites and would like advice to improve

[charchri4]

With 50,000 clicks worth of cars and random things I thought I try my hand at photographing a person. I know a bad shot of a Cobra is better than a fantastic shot of a Prius so I hedged my bet with stunning subjects and just enough posing knowledge to be dangerous.

These are ruff cuts with just a few tweaks for exposure and cropping. I got a couple that are OK for one reason or another but I didn't have even 1 of the 650 shots that I thought were worthy of these gals and would appreciate your thoughts on improving for the next time.

1/800, f2.8 50mm prime. This was the last in a sequence where she started facing away from me and flipped her hair around to the camera. It's a tad out of focus and the flip was a hilarious disaster but I thought this was useable. I'm kind of feeling the back ground is distracting being so bright but not sure how to fix that. Thoughts?
_IMG4632 by Jim Stainer, on Flickr

1/160, f2.8 87.5mm with a bit of the flip up flash. This was the last shot of the day and light was about gone. I kind of don't like the button on the hat. Thoughts?
_IMG4794-Edit by Jim Stainer, on Flickr

1/180, f2.8 70mm with a bit of flip up flash. Just a standard portrait pose but the scarf looked much better in person than the big lump here. Thoughts?
_IMG4240 by Jim Stainer, on Flickr

And the boyfriend stopped by so...
1/180, f2.8 70mm with a little flash for catch lights. So how do I get their exposure to match? He is over exposed but she is not.
_IMG4265 by Jim Stainer, on Flickr

Yeah I know it's out of focus (how my shutter speed ended up at 1/100 I'll never know!) so I tried B&W to cover that up a bit but it's just too cute to not use...
_IMG4775 by Jim Stainer, on Flickr

The ladies had fun and I think would do it again but I really have to have better stuff than this. Any thoughts to improve would be appreciated.

 

[tirediron]

Overall, not bad. One of the things about portraits is that they're often best shot in portrait aspect. 2 & 3 especially, I think would have benefitted from a more vertical crop. Watch the little things like the cropped bit of elbow on the girl in #4. It's not a huge deal, but it does look a little 'messy'.

 

[charchri4]

Oh so you mean they should be taller than wide and I should have left the tip of the elbow in the shot?

 

[tirediron]

Oh so you mean they should be taller than wide and I should have left the tip of the elbow in the shot?

Exactly. A single person is tall and thin; when you orient your camera vertically ("Portrait" orientation), you get more person in the shot. It's by no means a rule, but it often improves shots of single individuals.

 

[Ysarex]

Agree with Tirediron -- turn that camera on its side.

You need better control over color and tone processing as well. These look a lot better with some processing attention.

Joe

 

[charchri4]

WOW that looks soooo much better ! Thank you for the visual of what to shoot for these are a great bench mark. So I have about 20 more that need some work would you mind telling me what you did there?

 

[Ysarex]

WOW that looks soooo much better ! Thank you for the visual of what to shoot for these are a great bench mark. So I have about 20 more that need some work would you mind telling me what you did there?

How are you processing photos? Do you save camera raw files and what software do you have?

I adjusted white balance for appropriate skin color and then adjusted the tone response. The first photo was too dark and both lacked good contrast. The red head needed some local tone correction.

Joe

 

[charchri4]

Yes sir 24 mg raw files using lightroom 6 and photoshop elements 13 but this is the first time I have ever tried to get skin color right or remove a stray hair over an eye before so I have no clue. I played with some of the auto stuff in light room and hated the look so just kind of guessed. I thought about just trying to spot brush the red head and should have pursued it. I did move the temp over just a tad left to make the eyes more blue and snow more white but did not mess with tone at all.

The other thing that may hurt more than it helps is I am processing on triple heads and kind of splitting the difference between them all hoping they will look good on other monitors too.

Joe that is really helpful and I'm looking forward to trying again tonight with them!

 

[Dmariehill]

These aren't bad actually. We're often our worst critics, but I personally think that's how we improve.

In shot #3 for example. I don't think the scarf if the issue, I think the background draws the eye too much. The white patch of snow is competing with her for attention. In the couple shot, you've blocked that so it's not distracting in the same way. Moving her over and shooting vertically would help.

I think what's bothering you to some degree is that the people don't pop in the pics. I want my people to stand out, to be what catches your eye first and draws attention. So a lot of grey and white in the background and the clothes can sometimes make it harder to get that pap.

I'm a beginner but most of what I have shot is portraits. I sometimes take pictures of backgrounds with noone in front of them and then look at them on the computer to evaluate them before using them with people. It's helped me rule out distracting backgrounds before I get started.

 

[Derrel]

I would check into the Iris Enhace tool and the Teeth Whitening tool in Lightroom. They are very easy to use, as long as you do not go overboard on the settings, and use them at moderate settings levels, in the 60-73 range. Iris Enhance can help a lot when the eyeballs themselves lack sparkle and color, or are a bit too dark. I am a firm believer that when the main subject of a photo is taller than it is wide, that the natural camera framing is usually a vertical framing. On shots two and three, I think cropping off the empty space, and making a square aspect ratio image might be better--especially in this, the era of Instagram, and web-based thumbnails, and so on. A square or square-ish image is actually very nice in today's small-screen world of smart phones, tablets, and the web and so on.

A second issue, related to the above choice of camera framing, vertical versus horizontal is simply this: on a one-person shot, a "tall" image shows the face much LARGER, and more clearly than a "wide" shot does. Same person, same pose, but a BIGGER face in a tall shot than in the equivalent wide. This looks better on a smart phone, which is exactly how a huge percentage of people share and show photos like these...as "talls", on a very nice,modern smart phone screen.

The square aspect lends itself very well to simple, easy, centered-in-frame compositions, and also eliminates a large percentage of the background areas that clutter up and distract from people-shots that had originally been been shot as "wides".

I think the reason Instagram took off so well, and so fast, is that until very recently (2015) it was almost exclusively, or let's say, by default a SQUARE-image viewing platform! Not implying this is your issue, but many people shot images that had a lot of dead, empty space, and Instagram's SQUARE aspect nature forced people to either shoot square, and thus frame in-camera, OR to take their talls and wides and heavily crop them down, to squares, thus eliminating anything that was not totally necessary, and thus focusing in on the actual, main, essential subject matter, and cropping out a large part of shots that had been originally snapped as a tall or wide frame shot.

 

[Ysarex]

Yes sir 24 mg raw files using lightroom 6 and photoshop elements 13 but this is the first time I have ever tried to get skin color right or remove a stray hair over an eye before so I have no clue. I played with some of the auto stuff in light room and hated the look so just kind of guessed. I thought about just trying to spot brush the red head and should have pursued it. I did move the temp over just a tad left to make the eyes more blue and snow more white but did not mess with tone at all.

The other thing that may hurt more than it helps is I am processing on triple heads and kind of splitting the difference between them all hoping they will look good on other monitors too.

Joe that is really helpful and I'm looking forward to trying again tonight with them!

If you upload one of the raw files (dropbox) I'd be happy to send you an xmp file that would let you see all the adjustments made to the image.

You can't worry about looking good on other monitors. You have to calibrate your display and process to that.

Joe

 

[charchri4]

I was hopping you would chime in Darrel! Thanks! About half of them were shot vertically I'm just a bad cropper so this is really useful. You are right that shot above looks way better without the trees in it!

Now I get to hate that loose hair on the right! I took out several single strands around her left eye but is one that big something you guys would take out?

Thank you Joe I will do that tonight!

 

[vintagesnaps]

Seems to be a need to make sure you're getting proper exposures, although I find that can be tricky with snow (which we don't get a lot here).

Watch the hair - lovely girl but there's a hunk bunched up on the right on this one, and it's chopped off at the bottom; in profile it goes down her back and kind of blends in with the snow. Needed to check, smooth, arrange the hair as she moved from one pose to another.

Think about where you're putting the subjects in relation to the backgrounds; the portions of snow make for light color shapes against darker areas. Notice everything in that rectangle of a viewfinder, make sure everything is where you want it to be. Slow down and take time to compose your images instead of shooting so many, go for quality more than quantity, instead of firing off the shutter think about what you're doing.

 

[charchri4]

Just googled iris enhance and teeth whitening. I didn't know they were there and that is really helpful. I did that a little on a couple of them anyway but not with the plug in just with the spot brush. Back to the drawing board!

 

[charchri4]

Seems to be a need to make sure you're getting proper exposures, although I find that can be tricky with snow (which we don't get a lot here).

Watch the hair - lovely girl but there's a hunk bunched up on the right on this one, and it's chopped off at the bottom; in profile it goes down her back and kind of blends in with the snow. Needed to check, smooth, arrange the hair as she moved from one pose to another.

Think about where you're putting the subjects in relation to the backgrounds; the portions of snow make for light color shapes against darker areas. Notice everything in that rectangle of a viewfinder, make sure everything is where you want it to be. Slow down and take time to compose your images instead of shooting so many, go for quality more than quantity, instead of firing off the shutter think about what you're doing.

I have to tell you I totally went deer in the head lights with this. They were looking at me for what to do and my brain just froze. Everything else I have ever shot is waiting for the right moment for the car to come by or the goose to take off. There was no waiting at all in this and it was down right exhausting! I ran out of ideas in about 10 minutes and was just overwhelmed. My first dozen shots were so overexposed they were useless because I didn't even check the camera settings! I truly don't know how you pros do it and make it look so easy! So yeah you are spot on I came away with 600 shutter actuations and 6 good shots!

Thank YOU for the advice. I've learned more in the last 24 hours about shooting than in the last 24 months!