Christmas Portraits

jdorseydesign

This Christmas I've been using a shoot-though umbrella and off camera flashes (ebay triggers) to take various portraits. I'm looking for C&C so I can learn how to improve my photos. Thanks.

These are of my Sister and her dogs.







I also volunteered to take Santa portraits at the Nursing home where my wife works. I've been selling cheap prints off of smugmug (everyone got a free 4x6 from the nursing home, but they could order extras from me off smugmug) (Sorry about the watermarks)





The rest of the photos are in this album..

http://jdorseydesign.smugmug.com/gallery/6741310_CHPh3/1/430599346_QxuyJ

I picked two of the ones I thought were the best. It's really hard to get older people who have dementia to look nice in photos, so in some of the photos they aren't smiling, etc... Not sure how we can improve that as a photographer. Although, next year I'm going to have to constantly remind Santa to smile, you can see the lack of a smile in his eyes.

BTW, this is my first post on dgrin, so far I've loved reading this forum. I'm learning a lot just by seeing what other people are shooting.

Qarik

I love the lighting on the 1st shot. the shadows on the face are perfect with nice expression. I think it could use a smidgeon more exposure but that could just be my monitor. The 2 dog shots are okay as well but the light on her face is really brining out all the wrinkles and imperfection on her skin/cheek..maybe not so much what you wanted.

jdorseydesign

Qarik wrote:

I love the lighting on the 1st shot. the shadows on the face are perfect with nice expression. I think it could use a smidgeon more exposure but that could just be my monitor. The 2 dog shots are okay as well but the light on her face is really brining out all the wrinkles and imperfection on her skin/cheek..maybe not so much what you wanted.

I think what I need to do is mess with the clarity control in Lightroom more In fact, that's what I did with the first one, I lowered the clarity control. It made the skin softer, without losing too much detail in the eyes, etc.

Here we go:

Qarik

quite an improvement