My first shoot with my first studio setup (comment please :D)

[Hrern1313]

Im fairly new to the site so please bear with me

I invested in a basic portable studio setup a couple of days ago after having quite a bit of intrest from friends and aquaintanced about shoots, and convinced a friend to come along and do some vague modelling whilst I familiarised myself with it. This is my very first try at studio shots so and criticism, could it please be constructive haha (if you think something is wrong or dont like something please tell me why so i can get better

) Ive also experiemented with some editing, more on some than others.

 

[gopal]

second is very fine..third too is a cool one....in first u shd have setup the light so her both eyes have catchlights...is it not odd...?

 

[vegasvisionstudios]

A decent first try with some practice and experience you will be kicking out quality portraits before you know it. Since this was a shake out shoot I will not touch on the posing other then to say that the pose is as crucial to a portrait as the lighting. If the pose does not flatter the model it does not matter how well lit the image is the subject will not like the image.

#1 You should make a choice to shoot for either High Key or Midkey, the graduated exposer of the background draws attention away from the model and leaves the viewer with the feeling that the BG is not properly lit and exposed.

Pull the model a little further off the background to prevent your key light form striking the bg and creating the circle of over exposure camera right and the hard shadow camera left.

The catch lights are in both eyes but clone the smaller catechlight out of both eyes, one brings life to an image but 2 catchlights in the eye only bring confusion.

Next after you have the model off the bg add a light behind her to create a touch of rim light to help separate her from the background. The film plane is one dimensional and without some back lighting this image lacks dimension

#2 The model is turned away from the key light and is obviously not settled into a pose yet. The image is far to candid and snapshotish to be a portrait.

Ar far as the lighting it suffers from the same issues as #1 even though the natural falloff is now being used better to create e a low key background.

It looks like your light sources are pretty small, as the fall off on the models body is happening quite rapidly, that or the lights were not fully recycled when this shot was taken. The inverse square law is getting you a little as well in both these first 2 images as the point of her should is the closet point to the light and subsequently is also the brightest point in the images.

You could try bringing that key light back about 10 degree closer to center to get a more consistently even exposure. Raise key light on the long side of the face up above models eye level and then lower the left side fill light to eye level and you will start to discover the Rembrandt lighting technique but you still need some hair light coming in from behind to create separation.

#3 By far the best shot of the series. Maybe a little less of a pure profile would be more flattering and give a bit more depth and dimension but this is the shot that comes closest to being a true portrait with visual interest.
Again the exposure may be just a touch hot but it is within an acceptable range and provides a bit of skin smoothing while leaving just enough detail to give the image shape and defined form.

It maybe an illusion created by the image angle but it appears that when you made your selection of the eye to selectively color it you missed part of the cornea which has created a disturbing doubling shift in the shape of the eye. As if there is a second eye sitting on top of the first

 

[ShootHoops]

I still consider myself pretty new to photography (because I don't shoot much, especially portraits) so I don't have any CC for you.

But I really like #2!