Opportune portrait.....feel free to critique

[Spesh]

Taken at a friends house a few days ago. I'm a relative novice to portrait photography, so any comments are welcome (anything glaringly wrong?)......

 

[Light Guru]

under exposed, harsh shadows, the man looks high on something

 

[Spesh]

the man looks high on something

Only Whiskey.

 

[Derrel]

under exposed, harsh shadows, the man looks high on something

NOW THAT'S A real TPF C&C!!!!!! Bravo!

 

[amolitor]

More portraits have been shot of people high on something than not, I am pretty sure.

Yeah, it's underexposed and appears to be shot with on-camera flash. You can push the exposure up a bit, and it looks a lot better, but still not great. The flash is just not very fixable, it's just not gonna look that good. The background is pretty blah as well, possibly if you cloned out some of the mysterious crud back there it would look better.

On the up side: Well framed, to my eye. In focus. Good handling of depth of field. You've handled more than half of the technical bits of portrait shooting quite well.

I don't know the guy, but this feels like a pretty honest and accurate portrayal of some guy. There's no artifice here, no mugging for the camera, no lying. This is a guy, here he is. This is the man himself, no illusions, no dishonesty. If that's not portraiture, what is?

 

[Derrel]

Well-framed? Uh....not really...his chin's riding awfully low in the frame, and the camera height appears to be about the hairline level. This is what I call "awkward framing".

 

[MLeeK]

He looks a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio!
The shadows are a killer and it's INCREDIBLY flat looking almost as if you tried to tame the flash back on his face.
Focus looks good and color looks accurate.
It looks kind of like a snap where you caught him off guard, more than a portrait.

 

[MLeeK]

Quick, dirty adjustment in Adobe Camera Raw

 

[Spesh]

Thanks, for the feedback guys. As stated in the title, this was just an opportune shot as he sat across the room from me. I didn't have my flash gun mounted at the time.

I wanted to try to keep the image honest. Excessive glitzy processing would not have been true to this guys character. However, I take onboard what people have said. I'm a complete novice at shooting portraits (especially indoors). I normally shoot sports and landscapes.