Cheer photo c&c

rogerchester

Cheer leader photos this weekend. Not real happy with them.

http://<a href="http://r-prescott.smugmug.com/Cheer-portraits/Henry-Clay-cheer-2011/18981501_DfQfT9#1474152460_qKJ2t57-A-LB&quot; title=""><img src="http://r-prescott.smugmug.com/Cheer-portraits/Henry-Clay-cheer-2011/i-qKJ2t57/0/M/IMG3661pp-M.jpg&quot; title="" alt=""></a>

MileHighAko

I looked through the gallery. Guessing it was close to mid-day. Tough light to shoot portraits in. Many of the shots have harsh shadows from either their facial features or hair ribbons, etc. Other big gripe is that many (most) of the shots have an uneven horizon. That's probably a quick fix in LR or whatever PP tool you're using. Unless of course that's the effect you're looking for, but for me personally I found myself tilting my head. I found your group shots to be more appealing than the individual portraits.

rainbow

The shots are shot with bright sun and shadows on some features. BUT the photos do not show the range of that light, meaning I am guessing that you pushed the shadow (or darkness or ...) slider to fight the harshness of the light. The result is that the photos lose all their "pop" because the contrast is correspondingly lowered, giving it a flat appearance. Looks like the exposure is right on for the faces in the light which is great. Can you push the "black point" more to the limit, which would make the shadows darker without losing detail? Does that look better to you?

JimKarczewski

Something I'd suggest if you have to shoot in the direct sun like that.. well, you can go 2 ways.. A large scrim to put the girls under, which is going to end up blowing out the background because you can bring the light down (and even) 2 stops on the subjects or a portable powered studio flash to get power equal to or overpower the sun.

I string for the local newspaper and we had to shoot all of the local schools for the football season section. Mid-day sun and no shelter. I opted for my Calumet 750w/s strobe with a beauty dish and portable power.

I had to link to another site because Smug is in ReadOnly mode right now.. But this is the strobe version, with the use of a 2 stop ND filter to help get a nice shallow DOF (so I could keep the max 1/200 sync)



I do have one, if I can find it, where I did a scrim above a model.. I'll have to dig, it's a couple years old, if I find it, I'll post it here. These are rather large.. but very similar to what I made with PVC pipe and some fabric from the store - http://www.sunbounce.com/index.php?id=scrim_the_light0&L=1