First paid senior Portrait Gig...

Candid Arts

Is going to be next wednesday. Kinda nervous, kinda excited. It's my cousin's friend, so it should be fairly relaxed, and in the country. It's the first time yet that I've gotten a paid job at exactly what is described on my website scheduled.

Any tips? Pointers? Etc...?

Candid Arts

Well...anyways, here are some of my favorites from the day C&C Please, Thank you:

#1 - Clover Field


#2 - Grass Field


#3 - Mustard Seed Field


#4 - Mustard Seed Field 2


#5 - Gravel Road


#6 - Abandoned Barn


#7 - Abandoned Barn 2 - "Writing a Country Song"


#8 - Saddle Straddle


#9 - Saddle Straddle 2


#10 - Hill Top


#11 - Lone Rock


#12 - Cattle Shoot


#13 - Pond


#14 - Pondering


Thanks in advance.

Swartzy

Overall, they are good photos. The saturation on many is a bit much...especially the skin tones. What is missing here, especially with the horse, is interaction. Most of his poses are straight-on and lack character. When photographing people, we want to capture the essence of personality if possible...often times this takes a great deal of direction on our part. Shots of him on the horse or say a close up of him stroking the horse's forehead, different angles and perspectives would allow a sense of connectivity. #7 conveys a good mood and the processing is correct for that shot.

I often repeat myself and will again here....get low, get high, get tight, get loose, tilt it, angle it..walk around looking through the viewfinder.....FIND the shot....when you see it, you'll know it. Think of every shot as if it were going to hang on the wall....then you'll come away with what I call, "Ooooh Babies".

Candid Arts

Swartzy wrote:

Overall, they are good photos. The saturation on many is a bit much...especially the skin tones. What is missing here, especially with the horse, is interaction. Most of his poses are straight-on and lack character. When photographing people, we want to capture the essence of personality if possible...often times this takes a great deal of direction on our part. Shots of him on the horse or say a close up of him stroking the horse's forehead, different angles and perspectives would allow a sense of connectivity. #7 conveys a good mood and the processing is correct for that shot.

I often repeat myself and will again here....get low, get high, get tight, get loose, tilt it, angle it..walk around looking through the viewfinder.....FIND the shot....when you see it, you'll know it. Think of every shot as if it were going to hang on the wall....then you'll come away with what I call, "Ooooh Babies".

Thank you. I wanted to bring out the colors of the day a lot w/o it looking to fake, I think it works well for that. The skin tones I tried in most to desat them as much as possible to bring them away from the red. His skin was very red that day, for what reason I don't know, but it was. These are brought down quite a bit already. The horse shots were tough, thing is a rodeo horse, and didn't want to stay still that long. Plus we had talked about mounting a saddle on it, but it wasn't something they wanted to do, and he was certain he didn't want to get on it bareback. Direction is something I have a very hard time with. I usually don't really know what I want 'till I got it, and I'm uncomfortable telling people what to do. However in this shoot I was about 110% better than I normally am. That is my big thing that I'm working on. Just trying to get enough jobs to actually get the practice. Interaction/emotion with him was kind of difficult, these are just some of my favorites, there are more in the gallery that might show what you're looking for. We didn't have a whole lot of time to hang out and become super comfortable with eachother before the shoot. It was extremely last minute and didn't have a lot of time to plan. He and his mom had a lot of ideas of shots that they wanted, in which when I saw something I wanted, I'd pose them or arrange differently from there.

I tend to do the get low/high thing fairly often, and the couple times I tried for this shoot, there was just something that wasn't working when I looked at it through the viewfinder. I think #5 is a moderate example of going low, but you're right, looking back through these 14, they are all fairly straight on. I don't like to angle when I can see a horizon (most of the time). If it looks like it should be level, then for me, it has to be level, I'm really weird and anal that way. I do tend to walk around though looking for a good backdrop, or sceen, sometimes look through the view finder to see what it's going to look like, I do that for almost every shot, or atleast location.

Overall I was really happy with this shoot, when I had my mom take a look at the gallery, I got the "Ooooh Babies" response from her, but then again, she's just my mom.

Anyways, thanks for the tips and input. Much appreciated.

Nikolai

Swartzy wrote:

Overall, they are good photos. The saturation on many is a bit much...especially the skin tones. What is missing here, especially with the horse, is interaction. Most of his poses are straight-on and lack character. When photographing people, we want to capture the essence of personality if possible...often times this takes a great deal of direction on our part. Shots of him on the horse or say a close up of him stroking the horse's forehead, different angles and perspectives would allow a sense of connectivity. #7 conveys a good mood and the processing is correct for that shot.

I often repeat myself and will again here....get low, get high, get tight, get loose, tilt it, angle it..walk around looking through the viewfinder.....FIND the shot....when you see it, you'll know it. Think of every shot as if it were going to hang on the wall....then you'll come away with what I call, "Ooooh Babies".

+1
Saturation is most definitely an overkill for me, but I guess, it can be a personal choice. They also seem to be overcooked lighting wise.
Scenery is magnificent, though:-)

Candid Arts

Nikolai wrote:

+1
Saturation is most definitely an overkill for me, but I guess, it can be a personal choice. They also seem to be overcooked lighting wise.
Scenery is magnificent, though:-)

The saturation (to the naked eye) was pretty saturated actually, not this saturated obviously, but very vibrant. So I took that, and pushed it a little further.

Lighting...eek. That's something I'm working on and am new at. It was an extremely bright day, sun almost right over us. I had my 580 so I could expose for the background and fill him with some light to knock down some shadows as much as possible. I had to crank the FEC way up to even see any effect on a lot of the shots. I am in 100% agreement with you that some of them are overcooked. Just something I'm working on. Haven't done a whole lot with artificial lighting yet.

The scenery is magnificent, I really miss living out there, now I'm in the damn city, which I hate. So the trip out to the country was nice, and much needed.

Thanks for the input and compliments Nikolai, very welcomed advice.

chrisdg

agreed on the over-saturation. the blues and greens are particularly unrealistic. great locations though!

Candid Arts

chrisdg wrote:

agreed on the over-saturation. the blues and greens are particularly unrealistic. great locations though!

Are they that unrealistic? They don't seem THAT unrealistic to me. I emailed the customer to see what they thought, and offered to adjust them if they see fit. Hopefully not, but we'll see.

Rhuarc

Candid Arts wrote:

Are they that unrealistic? They don't seem THAT unrealistic to me. I emailed the customer to see what they thought, and offered to adjust them if they see fit. Hopefully not, but we'll see.

Just thought of a reason people may be seeing different things. Do you have your monitor color calibrated? If not that could be why they don't look as saturated for you, but do for others.

Just a thought...

I really like the B&W treatment on #6 and #7!

Candid Arts

Rhuarc wrote:

Just thought of a reason people may be seeing different things. Do you have your monitor color calibrated? If not that could be why they don't look as saturated for you, but do for others.

Just a thought...

I really like the B&W treatment on #6 and #7!

That's a possibility. I could see them being over saturated for some people though, I did bump it a bit, but just didn't think it was that far. I don't have my monitor calibrated. Don't even know how to begin to start that process. Kinda would like to wait 'till I get a real monitor for my editing instead of my little MacBook 13" screen...

Thanks though!

I got a lot more photos from the day in the gallery, but I have it private right now until I get the model released signed and returned. Then you can see the rest of all the photos. Had a lot of good ones, these were just some of my favs.

Tim Kamppinen

They all look quite oversaturated to me, some of them to the point of being cartoonish. As for the lighting, I think #4 shows the best blending of fill flash with the ambient light. You did a really nice job with that one. On many of the others it looks like there's either too much or not enough light on his face. Shooting portraits in bright sunlight is not an easy thing to do, and it can be hard to get really nice light on the face. One way to stack the odds in your favor is avoid it if possible and find some open shade to shoot in like the north side of a building or the shadow of a tree, etc. Here you will have nice soft light and you will also be able to add your own light in more easily because you're not competing with the rays of the blazing sun. Most of all, I'd say look into getting your flash off camera. This will allow you to create much more flattering and interesting light on your subject's face, rather than just straight on fill flash which serves its purpose but looks flat and less than compelling much of the time, and can create undesireable shadows such as the one in #7. Check out http://www.strobist.com to find out everything you wanted to know about off camera flash.

divamum

You've made a great start with these, but I have to agree with the others - they are very oversaturated on my (calibrated) monitor, the blue looks like the blue you see on "blue screen" in a TV studio. Seriously - it's that bright, in 3 and 4 even giving him a halo around his head where the blue meets the white hat.

That said, I think you have some great shots and I'm sure they'll be happy with them - the scenery is spectacular, and the shots with tack and horse are gonna be winners with his family, I'm sure. You've got good material, but with some tweaks it can be even better!

Btw, highly recommend a Huey Pantone as reasonably-priced calibration solution - I use one with my laptop and it makes a HUGE difference. Was $50 very well spent (I got mine used from a dgrinner, but even new they're only about $70).

Candid Arts

Well crap. I guess I should go through them and de-sat a bit. I might wait 'till the mom and son go through and look at them to see if they think they should be brought down a bit or not, since really it's up to them.

Thanks everyone for the input.

Thanks Tim for the ideas. I do have some light stands and umbrellas, but didn't figure I had enough light to be effective after reflecting off of an umbrella. As you can see, there are a lot of wide open spaces, not a whole lot of shaded areas. I shot a wedding recently, where (when we could) did just that. Found a tree, got on the shaded side of it, used two off camera flashes with umbrellas, and shot that way. Worked great for awhile.

Thanks Divamum for the tips on the calibration system. I will have to look into that, because honestly, I don't see myself getting a real monitor ANY time soon, as rent is even looking tight right now.

Candid Arts

So I took this one, dropped the sat by -15 and the vibrance by -15. Does this look better? I must really need to get my monitor calibrated, because as they do look very vibrant, I really like how...well...vibrant it looks.

Nikolai

Candid Arts wrote:

So I took this one, dropped the sat by -15 and the vibrance by -15. Does this look better? I must really need to get my monitor calibrated, because as they do look very vibrant, I really like how...well...vibrant it looks.

I like it... Except it still looks overlit...

Candid Arts

Nikolai wrote:

I like it... Except it still looks overlit...

How's this? Dropped exp. and brightness a tad, and added a smaller tad of fill light.



That's weird. It looks darker on my monitor in LR, but when I upload it and I'm looking at it here, it still looks bright...

Nikolai

Candid Arts wrote:

How's this? Dropped exp. and brightness a tad, and added a smaller tad of fill light.

Now it looks both overlit and overprocessed

That's weird. It looks darker on my monitor in LR, but when I upload it and I'm looking at it here, it still looks bright...

Are you using a non-sRGB color space by any chance?

Candid Arts

Nikolai wrote:

Now it looks both overlit and overprocessed

Are you using a non-sRGB color space by any chance?

AHHHH!!! I quit. Going back to sales... This is too difficult.

Nope, I got my camera set on sRGB, LR set to export as sRGB...

jeffreaux2

Well it looks as if Nik is trying to lead you in the right direction so Ill lay off the processing, flash and exposure issues...other than pointing you to the tips at the link in my signature below.

The interaction mentioned though....

-I bet that except for these photos your subject spends very little time standing with his horse. He is probably either doing the grooming, feeding, bonding, or riding that is the responsibility of owning an animal of this sort. Some of that would have been nice.

I understand full well the difficulties in photographing a high school seniors with a large animal involved. I had my trial by fire on that front already. It can be challenging, but also a lot of fun. My advice there is that if the rider is actually on the horse, then some interaction...some communication....between the two of them is instantly implied.

Heres a link to my post from last year....the link to this photo is broken in that post...

http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=92131

Candid Arts

Ok, so I went through and brought the vinbrance, saturation, adjusted the HUE down on all the photos, and then adjusted the exposure as much as I could.

Here are a few of the results:

#1


#2


#3


The rest are in the private gallery and will be unlocked soon. Are these better? I really like the other ones better, but I got overwhelming responses that they were too saturated, so against my best judgment, I brought them down.

Nikolai

Candid Arts wrote:

Ok, so I went through and brought the vinbrance, saturation, adjusted the HUE down on all the photos, and then adjusted the exposure as much as I could.

Here are a few of the results:

#1

#2

#3

The rest are in the private gallery and will be unlocked soon. Are these better? I really like the other ones better, but I got overwhelming responses that they were too saturated, so against my best judgment, I brought them down.

#1 is almost there imho. The other two still look oversaturated...

Yet you know, if both you and your customer like them - let them be, who cares what a bunch of old pixelbators think

Candid Arts

Nikolai wrote:

#1 is almost there imho. The other two still look oversaturated...

Yet you know, if both you and your customer like them - let them be, who cares what a bunch of old pixelbators think

Thanks Nik. I personally am not a fan of the color in any of the photos I de saturated, I dunno, I guess I just like over saturation. I'm waiting to hear back from the customer, so we'll see. But before they could look at the old edits, I changed them all over, so all they are going to see is the new ones.

jeffreaux2

I honestly think that if you aren't using a hardware type calibration device to calibrate your monitor you really have no idea what the photos might look like. I got a huge surprise the first time I used one and looked back through all the photos I had blindly edited. Color was my biggest issue...as I have always used the histogram to adjust exposure.

The two Nik just mentioned definately are still much over saturated.

Candid Arts

jeffreaux2 wrote:

I honestly think that if you aren't using a hardware type calibration device to calibrate your monitor you really have no idea what the photos might look like. I got a huge surprise the first time I used one and looked back through all the photos I had blindly edited. Color was my biggest issue...as I have always used the histogram to adjust exposure.

The two Nik just mentioned definately are still much over saturated.

Alright, so apparently I really need to get my monitor calibrated. I got one reccomendation that was about $70 brand new...Any cheaper ones that still do a good job? I know you can't buy something cheap and expect it to be good, but I'm just starting to work full time tomorrow, so I don't have any money right now. I'll have to wait, but it sounds like I really need to do it as soon as possible.

jeffreaux2

Candid Arts wrote:

Alright, so apparently I really need to get my monitor calibrated. I got one reccomendation that was about $70 brand new...Any cheaper ones that still do a good job? I know you can't buy something cheap and expect it to be good, but I'm just starting to work full time tomorrow, so I don't have any money right now. I'll have to wait, but it sounds like I really need to do it as soon as possible.

Theres several options out there, and you can pretty much pay whatever you want.....like any other piece of gear!

I use the Pantone Huey. It's very basic, but gets the job done. IF I did my own prints, I would probably want to use something more elaborate, and I don't think it supports multiple monitors. For that Id have had to spend more on a more flexible device. I really never print images at home....as smugmug and millers do it so well I dont have to.

I've been happy with it, and it has served me well for a couple years now.

I am sort of in the middle of switching over to a new pc. This switch...at present ...has me switching my monitor between two pc's right now. My old pc has a month or two old calibration on it whereas my new pc is current. It is a night and day difference in brightness, saturation, and contrast between the two stored profiles. This tells me that my LCD is dimming over time. That is what monitors do....dim over time....though mine seems to be doing it at an advanced pace. THAT is as good of an example as any to demonstrate why a monitor should be calibrated on a regular basis.

Have you ever looked back at photos you edited.....oh last year?....and though..."My those look darker than I remembered?".

Candid Arts

Great advice, thank you.

I have looked at photos I've edited awhile ago, but they hadn't looked darker really, just...well not edited well. I've gone through every photo I have on my site (plus more) and re-edited everything with the tools available to me, and mew new found knowledge on how to use them all and when to use them. I wouldn't say they were darker though, just not as good as they could be.

Elaine

I was going to say the same thing as Jeff about the calibration. You may think you like the original edits better, but if you saw them calibrated, perhaps that would change your mind.
You sure had a beautiful location for these. Hasn't Oregon weather been stellar lately? And the clover fields are fabulous!
For whatever reason, I think I'm mostly drawn to #2. It's all blue and green and he just pops right out of it. I wonder if a longer lens and shallower DOF had been used if the trees behind him would have faded away a bit more...that might have been nice, especially with off camera flash.
I'm bettin' they'll like these. He's got a nice smile and the location will be meaningful for them.
Calibration and color issues have been frustrating for me at times as well. I tend to not calibrate as often as I should, just because I don't like to think about it! But, it definitely makes a difference in my output, and in my confidence to have prints made. The other thing that made the biggest difference for me, quite frankly, was to get a higher quality monitor upon which to do the calibration! Talk about a difference. The gear list never ends, right?!

Scott_Quier

Candid Arts wrote:

Lighting...eek. That's something I'm working on and am new at. It was an extremely bright day, sun almost right over us. I had my 580 so I could expose for the background and fill him with some light to knock down some shadows as much as possible. I had to crank the FEC way up to even see any effect on a lot of the shots. I am in 100% agreement with you that some of them are overcooked. Just something I'm working on. Haven't done a whole lot with artificial lighting yet.

First, I'm not going to mention saturation or monitor calibration - you've already got plenty of advice on that. However, I couldn't read this and let it pass. Some things to keep in mind:

• Shadows are a good thing - they add texture and depth to our photos. Reducing the hat-brim induced shadow a bit is a good idea as we all like to see faces!
• Using flash on a sunny (mid-day shoot is absolutely the right thing to do. Without it, the contrast between light and shadow will swamp the available dynamic range of your camera ... resulting in a blown sky!
• Seeing the effect - fill flash is a subtle thing. It's usually easier to "do it by the numbers" than to judge by the image on the LCD. With Canon gear I've found a good technique to shoot manual mode, set exposure for the sky (which you did), and set FEC to -2/3 or -1.0 stop. Yes, dial it down. Reason: Because I don't want to SEE the flash in the photo - I want to only partially fill the shadows. Anything more than that and you have over-cooked the subject. This should get you a good balance between the fill and the ambient and you should be well within both the dynamic range of the sensor and not blowing any of the RGB channels. If the image is a lttle bright SOOC, then you can always dial down the exposure a bit in post.
• You didn't do yourself any favors shooting under the noon-day sun. Usually, it's easier and more attractive to shoot either early or late in the day and/or under shade. Here's a test/example of what can be done in that scenario. HTH

Nikolai

Scott_Quier wrote:

First, I'm not going to mention saturation or monitor calibration - you've already got plenty of advice on that. However, I couldn't read this and let it pass. Some things to keep in mind:

• Shadows are a good thing - they add texture and depth to our photos. Reducing the hat-brim induced shadow a bit is a good idea as we all like to see faces!
• Using flash on a sunny (mid-day shoot is absolutely the right thing to do. Without it, the contrast between light and shadow will swamp the available dynamic range of your camera ... resulting in a blown sky!
• Seeing the effect - fill flash is a subtle thing. It's usually easier to "do it by the numbers" than to judge by the image on the LCD. With Canon gear I've found a good technique to shoot manual mode, set exposure for the sky (which you did), and set FEC to -2/3 or -1.0 stop. Yes, dial it down. Reason: Because I don't want to SEE the flash in the photo - I want to only partially fill the shadows. Anything more than that and you have over-cooked the subject. This should get you a good balance between the fill and the ambient and you should be well within both the dynamic range of the sensor and not blowing any of the RGB channels. If the image is a lttle bright SOOC, then you can always dial down the exposure a bit in post.
• You didn't do yourself any favors shooting under the noon-day sun. Usually, it's easier and more attractive to shoot either early or late in the day and/or under shade. Here's a test/example of what can be done in that scenario. HTH

+1 And I concur to those :-)

Candid Arts

Wha Wha What?! Turn DOWN the FEC in BRIGHT sunlight? I would have never guessed to do that. I will have to play around with that apparently. We did have the shoot planned for about 3:30 in the afternoon, but then he wanted to change it to either later in the evening, or earlier in the morning. Due to the fact that I'm 45 miles away, and I had a house guest, there was no way I was going to make it down there earlier, and the house guest had to leave my house around 5:30, so I couldn't do it later. So we settled on noon, bad time to do it, and I didn't want to do it at that time, but it was the only option for that day. This was a very...shall we say unorganized shoot on his part. Moving days, moving times, extremely last minute...

Thanks Scott for the tips, always much appreciated and lessons learned.

divamum

Candid Arts wrote:

Wha Wha What?! Turn DOWN the FEC in BRIGHT sunlight? I would have never guessed to do that. I will have to play around with that apparently.

Absolutely! I'm hardly one of the resident fill flash experts and still working on this myself, but FWIW I usually START my fill flash settings with the FEC turned down as far as it will go, and then bump it up gradually as necessary after the test shot until there's juuusssttt enough to add the light I want. I usually do it from my camera menu simply because it's easier, although if that doesn't subdue the power enough I'll then switch the flash to manual and drop it down even further. I'm always trying to avoid it looking like I added flash - I want the result to SEEM like 100% natural light (I don't always nail it, but that's my goal!)

Experiment with this for sure - I think you'll enjoy the results