on the basketball court

[MLeeK]

You need to open your eyes and LOOK at what you are shooting. LOOK at what is showing up in that image. These last two are a hot mess of distractions and crap even though you have chosen a simple location.
There is a piece of garbage under the backpack, there is garbage under the porch, the hunk of broken siding and hunk of peeling paint, the mess of the deck on the porch to our right, the cellar window, the door, the mess of wires behind the porch. The backpack isn't a prop here, it's just in the way. If it were a prop it would have to be sitting up better and it would actually have to BE in the first image instead of cropped out.
All of this lack of thought and attention is giving you some basic snapshots.

 

[jamesbjenkins]

Thanks for the advice about focus.

Yeah, we didn't anticipate shooting there... actually the whole opportunity to work with him came up fast and without a lot of time to work out details beforehand. He also does hip-hop so some of the shots were more geared for that side of his personality.

Here are a couple others from another location:

OP, you really have got to pay attention to the details if you want to call yourself a photographer. Both of these pictures are a mess from start to finish. Some points to consider:

1. Why is the backpack in these pictures at all? It's very distracting from your subject's face, which I'm guessing is where you want our attention.
2. Why did you select this particular angle for the images? There's a ton of distracting lines and content behind the subject, not limited to the opposite railing (which is far too in focus to be missed), electrical lines, part of a electrical box, etc.
3. You need to pay very close attention to your settings in harsh lighting situations like this. the top right of both pictures are very distracting due to their near perfect white. The human eye is naturally drawn to the brightest part of an image first. Also, as MLeek mentioned, there's a TON of clutter on the ground and in the composition (grass in the bottom right corner, for instance).
4. As I said with the basketball pictures, these do not have the quality or attention to detail to even be considered portraits. What did you accomplish with these images that could not have been replicated exactly with any old phone with a camera on it? What were your white balance and aperture settings?

For images like what you're trying to accomplish, the details are everything. These are a miss IMO.

 

[dashboard2003]

I appreciate when people give me advice that includes one or two positive things as well as one or two suggestions for improvement. That is how good teachers make a difference, and how constructive criticism should be delivered.

When you have an hour to go through a neighborhood, find locations, and finish a shoot, and are lucky enough to find on one that's interesting, you go for it! It's a very cool dilapidated building. We were not about to spend 20 minutes cleaning up the ground. This is not upper middle-class suburbia nor is it a sterile corporate setting. It is also not studio portrait photography. It is not meant to be.

One reason the angle was chosen is happenchance because the adjacent building and various other things limited where I could stand. Have you considered that there may be some reasonable reasons and a story behind every photo? When I see a photo I imagine what the story of the person and the setting might be. I do not feel that you care much about the person or have any curiosity about the setting. I find both to be interesting. I aim to capture reality, not a cleaned-up version of reality.

This is not a college assignment where every photo is supposed to be the same. It is a not a newspaper piece where I am under deadline to meet a certain standard of perfection. I'm really surprised at all the judgment here. This forum does not seem to be a friendly place for self-expression, creativity, or for beginners to be encouraged. It seems to be a place where people are allowed to be harsh and inconsiderate.

There is quite a bit of thought here, not none as post #16 suggested. There is tons of room for improvement, one step at a time, and as my previous posts indicated I certainly know that and I stated I was a beginner, but its never appropriate to be so negative or throw around swear words in a response. It might take me five years to get where I want to be, but I'm not going to spend that five years being chastised for every photo I post.

 

[MLeeK]

Terribly sorry we didn't tell you that you were the latest and greatest addition to the photography world.

 

[KmH]

Thoughts and constructive suggestions are welcome!

And you got exactly what you asked for - thoughts and constructive suggestions.
Thoughts are not always necessarily constructive.

You will find an good set of tutorials here - Digital Photography Tutorials and I highly recommend the inexpensive photographic lighting fundamentals book - Light Science and Magic, Fourth Edition: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting

If you want to try again with some other photos, you'll need to start a new thread.

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