Monday, November 27, 2006

Me


Here I am playing with the wireless trigger for the camera and a soft box before heading out for the night.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice shot. Some things to think about...

1. Highlights are a little blown out. I realize the white glowing look is what you were going for, but with your face "blown out" it's a little over-powering and IMHO detracts from your face..which is the point of this photo I assume. Stopping down to f/8 might be a place to start, given that your light power remains the same. I noticed that your shutter speed was quite slow as well, so this let in more light than was probably necessary, which blew out the highlights.

2. The eye is naturally attracted to what is the strongest area of contrasts. In this case, your black jacket fights the white background as the strongest two opposing contrasts. For me at least, this pulls my eye away from your face and onto your jacket/bench. Portraits are all about the persons face (even their eyes more specifically), so by putting on lighter colored clothing (even white clothing) you would make your face the strongest contrast with the background and it would pull the viewers eyes straight to it.

3. The camera remote trigger should have been ditched. You could set your camera's timer to trigger and then you would have been able to throw the remote out of the scene, rather than it be in your hands and (again..) distract from your face

4. The EXIF info indicates that you shot this at a rather wide 22mm focal length. Nothing wrong with that per say, but moving the camera back and then shooting at a focal length of around 50-100mm (85 is a good focal length) gains you a sort of compression effect. Most all serious portrait photographers shoot in this focal range. The Canon 50mm 1.8 is a must have lense and is cheap at just over $100. On your Rebel 1.6 APSC sensor this nets you an approximate 80mm focal length.

5. I don't know what kind of post-processing work you did, but hopefully you are shooting RAW. This would afford you 1-1.5 stops of light either way. Doesn't fix everything if the light was to dark/strong in the first place

Anyways, like I said. Good shot and pose.

Lisa's Diet said...

Wow thanks so much for your notes, I hadn't considered any of those details as the photography world is still very new to me. Maybe I'll have to try this again with those alterations. I cropped the photo but didn't adjust it at all in Photoshop. I have the Canon 1.8 but the room with my lights isn't that deep so I'll need to figure out a solution for maneuvering. Thanks again for taking the time to comment.
Lisa

Anonymous said...

Some good links to start reading:

Off Camera Flash


Effective Portraits

Lisa's Diet said...

Cool thanks!

Rose said...

whoa, i just found a bunch of yer posts on my site! normally i don't think of a post after it's written until i went back and found all these posts (well, a few) by people. it's fun! but anyways, i think i hung out on those sofas at Trinity because i took a class there once many years ago. i think it was in some dorm and i was bored, had some time to kill and it was raining outside. uber comf.
so you're an aspiring photographer as well eh? i got a rebel in sept and the thing scared me to death (too many buttons and things)...but now i like it. there is always soooo much to learn!

-rose

Lisa's Diet said...

I love your banner picture at the top, keeps me coming back!

Anonymous said...

Hey, Lisa, does everyone know that if you click on your picture that it brings you to a slideshow page?

I love the pix in there......