DSLR Photography Forum

Hey guys,

Sorry I've been a bit quiet lately. The weather has been cold and miserable here and I've had no inspiration to go out shooting... so I pretty much put my camera away for a couple of weeks and concentrated on other things in life.

But... I got it out and took some shots of a friend last night just for something to do because we were bored.
Now I consider portrait shots to be an area of my photography where I feel least confident and need the most work on to improve, so my expectations weren't high... but I was really quite pleased with some of these shots I ended up with - in my mind they really manage to achieve the look I was going for.





Both shots were taken with the good old Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 prime lens at f/1.8, 1/320sec, ISO 1600. In hindsight I probably should have switched to ISO 800 or 400 to reduce noise, but I actually ended up adding more noise to the first image because I think the grain really suits it.
The lighting was just the available light in my lounge room (at night) - some halogen downlights and a couple of reading lamps. The dominant light on her face is from one of the reading lamps which was about 1m away from her face.

All feedback welcome and appreciated.
I was nearly going to post this in the critique section, but the subject is a close friend of mine - I guess these photos have some personal meaning to me which is perhaps more important than achieving an image which may be more technically pleasing.
I'm certainly happy to hear your opinions, thoughts, tips and advice as always, but I'm not really looking for a cold, clinical dissection of these photos I guess. Which is why I ended up putting them in the showcase section.

Cheers
Adrian

#1 is outstanding!! Great lighting, crop and composition.

The model has great eyes, and in #2 her syes are not showing much - much less "window to the soul" - so I am less enthusiastic about #2 - but I love #1.

The noise makes the shot Kombi! Fantastic. I decided to temporarily avoid lurking and comment on your shot.

I really like the composition of the first shot. Noise definitely adds to the image, no doubt about it.

the first shot is fantastic.

your web buddy

Hey Kombi... wonderful stuff! I like the graininess of #1 - makes it a very artistic, and the expression and features of the face are very appealing too. Great work!

Thanks for your comments guys

I agree that the 1st shot was easily the best of the evening (although I was actually very happy with a number of others).
I remember taking that particular shot. It gave me that little warm fuzzy satisfied feeling that only comes when you know you just captured a great moment (and then pray the shot comes out sharp with the right DOF and properly exposed).
Mind you, there was actually a fair bit of subtle photoshopping in there to get that image where it is. I smoothed out Sue's skin, whitened her eyes and made them a little more "smouldering"[tm] and kept her lips highly-saturated while desaturating her skin a bit (the original image was too saturated). Of course I also added noise which gives the illusion of sharp detail when there are very few sharp edges around, and also brings everything together nicely (the skin was starting to look a bit too "plasticky" after I smoothed it).

I agree with you Toad about the eyes being the "window to the soul", and that the 2nd shot suffers in comparison to the 1st in this way because Sue's eyes are less prominant. But I included the 2nd shot because I think it manages to capture elements of her personality quite well. It also gives you an un-photoshopped reference to compare to the 1st image.

But I'm glad you guys think the 1st shot is a significantly better than the 2nd. I printed out 4 shots from the shoot and showed them to her... I was jumping up and down with excitement about that 1st shot, but she seemed to like them all about the same and didn't know why I was excited.... I'm glad to see that she is the crazy one, not me