Summer portraits (critique?)

[stephluna97]

 

[YoungPhotoGirl]

Lovely model and well lit.
However, the first thing I noticed was missed focus (her hair instead of her face) and a general blur (usually caused by too slow a shutter speed or a movement of the camera on a wide aperture). Do you have any others that you took?

 

[WesternGuy]

Welcome to the Forum.

She is a very lovely model, she has a nice smile and, as YoungPhotoGirl has said, the lighting is quite good. My major comment is about the cropping in each of the images.

First row - left - you have cropped off her right knee and part of her leg.
First row - right - you have cropped off the whole left side of her body and her lower right arm.
Second row - the top of here head/hair is cropped off, although this is not as serious as cropping body parts.

If you are serious about portrait/people photography, then you will want to study up on what to crop and what not to crop and where to crop when it comes to taking portraits, whether it is outdoors or indoors. If you Google "cropping in portrait photography", you will find a multitude of sites that discuss image cropping in portrait photography and others that may even show you examples of good cropping and not so good cropping. The other suggestion that I have seen on a number of sites is not to fill the frame - give your subject a little bit of space to move and breathe. In my opinion, these images are just a bit to closely cropped.

Hope this helps. There is a lot of "help" out there, you just have to spend a bit of time researching it.

WesternGuy

 

[tirediron]

Spot-on comments above! Focus is absolutely critical in portraiture, and if nothing else is in focus, the eyes MUST be. Use single-point AF with that point over the near eye, and ensure that your DoF is sufficient to get everything you want sharply focused (I dislike OOF elements in faces, but that's a personal thing). When it comes to cropping, avoid cropping the torso, and while it is considered acceptable to crop limbs, it should always be done boldly, and never at/near/through a joint, and never crop off "bits" that is, toes, finger-tips, etc. If you're shooting ambient light images, consider bringing a reflector along to add a little fill and direct some light into the subject's eyes. #3 is a great image, but would be even better with a small catchlight.