Honest Feedback and Critique Please

[HeldInTheMoment]

As the title says, I am looking for honest feedback and critiques please. You can't hurt my feelings, if I want to grow as a photographer, mistakes will be made.

Thanks!
-Jake

 

[jaomul]

Personally I like it. If it was me I'd tone the blue down very slightly and I'd have slightly less space behind the lady

 

[Designer]

O.K., hold on.

Setting is less than ideal. The piers in the background are distracting. The horizon line crosses your model in a very distracting place. Backlight from the sun is not the end of the world, but you should put some light on your model's face and the front of her jacket. The model looking at what, we can't tell, but it would have been better to ask her to look at the camera. Once you see how distracting and basically useless the background is, you then turn your camera to portrait orientation, and the shot becomes a winner.

Background
light
add light
frame
pose
Boom!

 

[jaomul]

You may have a point, but in my opinion the background gives a sense of place. I could see this as a travel/memory type photo, rather that a posed nice background type photo. For me it succeeds there

 

[tirediron]

I would suggest cropping 2/3 of the empty space "behind" the subject, and removing the two pilings nearest two her. The one image left doesn't hurt. The horizon isn't ideally placed, but I think the thickness of her hood takes most of the curse off of that. Watch your framing. You've cropped off her right elbow!

 

[BananaRepublic]

As the title says, I am looking for honest feedback and critiques please. You can't hurt my feelings, if I want to grow as a photographer, mistakes will be made.

Thanks!
-Jake

I think those piers are the main distraction, the halos around their edges are the first things I saw. I like it otherwise.

 

[KmH]

For me a head & shoulders portrait is mostly about the subjects eyes - the window to a persons soul.

I would have wanted more light from the top of the tip of her nose to just above her eyebrows.

Her hands are quite red, maybe because they are cold, but I would edit the skin tone of her hands to match the skin tone of her face below the level of her lower lip.

Unfortunately, I can't show you what that would look like - Photos NOT OK to edit.

IMO, the outboard piers serve as a frame within a frame and help center attention on her.
For me the bokeh the lens produces is very ugly. It's jittery, rough, and distracting in the lower right corner of the frame.

In fact, I would probably crop away 3/4 of the right of the frame between it's edge and her shoulder so her face is more to the left in the frame.
Since we tend to look where someone in a photo is looking that right side space contributes little to the photograph.

 

[zombiesniper]

Agree with most of the above.
She had amazing eye's. I would crop in and remove some of the right of the photo plus a little more light on her face would be nice.
On the model side it looks a bit cool there. The rosey glow in the cheeks works but I would keep her hands warm until just before shooting.

 

[mrpink]

As above. As it sits it is a photo of some pilars and the water with a woman standing in the way.

Tighter crop will cure most of the issues.

pink

 

[john.margetts]

I would move the model away from that horizontal wood so that it was well out of focus. A larger aperture (smaller f-stop) would also help.

www.johns-old-cameras.blogspot.co.uk

 

[bulldurham]

I hope this does not constitute editing an image and though I did, I am not posting the edit itself but rather a screen shot of the layer adjustments on each of the three color channels. For the sake of going into great detail, I chose to work on the individual channels because I could affect only certain areas of color on rather global masks. There are a zillion ways to edit but for your purposes, I might suggest you remove the do not edit feature from your preferences. You might request if someone does edit, that only if they will include the screen shot of their layers prior to flattening, then both learning and teaching is taking place.

Not sure how you separated the foreground from the background but whatever you used, created a lot of chromatic aberration especially in the green channel.

 

[bulldurham]

A larger aperture (smaller f-stop) would also help.

www.johns-old-cameras.blogspot.co.uk

A little confusing, I think. Since Aperture and f:/stop are the same thing, perhaps, "a larger aperture, (smaller number) may also help."

 

[Didereaux]

Personally I like it. If it was me I'd tone the blue down very slightly and I'd have slightly less space behind the lady

That's exactly what I see as well. maybe much less space to the back of her...that light dead space is just distraction.

 

[HeldInTheMoment]

Thank you all for your Honest Feedback and Critique. It is very nice as most of the internet either wants to be a "Keyboard Warrior"and hide behind the internet, and on the other hand some people are too nice and it does not help me grow/learn how to improve.

Overall, THANK YOU!

P.S. I have changed the preferences to "OK TO EDIT" if anyone wants to take a whirl at it and show me how things could be adjusted.

Thanks!

 

[KmH]

A larger aperture (smaller f-stop) would also help.

A little confusing, I think. Since Aperture and f:/stop are the same thing, perhaps, "a larger aperture, (smaller number) may also help."

The only trouble with (smaller number) is f/2 is a BIGGER number than f/16 is, because they are fractions.