Mother's Day portraits - first big session

[ronlane]

I finished processing the portraits from this Sunday's Mother's Day photos that I took for the Mom's at my Church. Here are a few of the ones that I likes. The Mom's liked them as well. As I said, after a lot of nerves before, I had a blast despite all the work and sweating.
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2.

3.

4.

5.

 

[sarah_19_nz]

Nice! The first is my fav (no arms/shoulders cropped off.) Lighting looks good to me

 

[ronlane]

Thanks Sarah. I got them warmed up a bit and thought that I would share with everyone. The lessons that I learned on this session were that I should have gotten the grey card and actually USED it, and that I should have used my 28-135mm to allow myself more room as to not cut off limbs.

 

[Light Guru]

I find the wrinkly background distracting. Place the subjects farther away from the background and set your DOF to blur the background.

 

[ronlane]

Thanks Light. I understand the comments that you have. I did not have enough room to move them further away, my camera was back as far as I could get it at the time. As I stated in the original post, that was a lesson learned that I should have used my 28-135mm instead of the 70-200mm 2.8L.

 

[Light Guru]

Thanks Light. I understand the comments that you have. I did not have enough room to move them further away, my camera was back as far as I could get it at the time. As I stated in the original post, that was a lesson learned that I should have used my 28-135mm instead of the 70-200mm 2.8L.

You don't want to go to wide or people will start to look funny.
http://nofilmschool.com/2011/11/lens-choice-affects-subjects-appearance/

 

[ronlane]

Thanks Light. I understand the comments that you have. I did not have enough room to move them further away, my camera was back as far as I could get it at the time. As I stated in the original post, that was a lesson learned that I should have used my 28-135mm instead of the 70-200mm 2.8L.

You don't want to go to wide or people will start to look funny.
How Your Lens Choice Affects Your Subject's Appearance « nofilmschool

Yeah, I know, but I could have went to 50mm and I think it would have helped me on this shoot. I wouldn't have went any wider than that.

 

[ash12783]

I hope you don't mind (it says your photos are ok to edit) so i did a super fast edit to tone down the blue background and reduce some of the wrinkles- over all, nice images that i'm sure they were happy to have! There is room for improvement as you already mentioned but I know sometimes things just aren't doable at the time

 

[ronlane]

Thanks Ash. I don't mind. I am going to go back through them tonight or this week, but just to learn some new processing. I think I can darken the background to help with the wrinkles from watching a video last night, so I am going to try that.