Portraits - first 'real' attempts

[Woody]

Guys,
Yesterday I attended a 'Photography Workshop For Beginners' in Lichfield hosted by the Photographer who covered our Wedding (I hate having my photo taken, but Sara is brilliant - she put us at ease and the day flew by).

Anyway, she offer's a beginners workshop which I thought would be good to attend, as I have to confess that I prefer motorsport & watch photography to people (and I really love the style that Sara shoots)!.

When ever I've shot people in the past I've always used the 'Portrait' setting on my EOS 300D and have never been that happy with the results. If anything they've just looked like 'happy snaps' as opposed to a decent representation of the person I'm photographing.

With having two kids I thought it would be a nice idea to be able to actually take a decent picture of them.

I went in with an open mind and prepared to unlearn what I thought I knew .

We covered the basics of the camera controls so that we were all familiar with them (I'd forgotten what half of the buttons on my camera did!!).

Then we covered ISO, apeture, shutter speeds and there relationship to one another and how changing one can affect the other.

We then moved on to composition, natural light and exposure (over/under).

At the end of the 'theory' side I felt a bit more confident about sticking it in to 'Manual' and driving it properly (just like I had too all those years ago when I had my trusty Praktica BMS).

Our model (victim?? ) for the afternoon was the lovely Aimee who coped remarkably well (considering she's not actually a model and a family friend of Sara's) with 8 strangers shoving a camera in her face and asking her to smile constantly or 'move to the right a bit' on a rather chilly day.

We had a quick practice in the room where the course was held before we ventured out into public!



We had a walk round the corner to the area by the Catherdral and chose several places to shoot with varying degrees of natural light, including a couple of 'long exposure' shots (which I wasn't too happy with and havent included them here).

Here are a few of my favourites, these are straight from the camera with no processing - comments and critisism welcome people!

























Thanks for looking.

Chris

[Woody]

Bit of a bump!
Any comments welcome.
Had a couple of comments regarding focus - not sure if its operator error or if my lense is a bit soft.

Chris

[MysteryLemon]

Defo look soft on a few of them. Looks like focus to me.

Some are nice though! Good effort

[andy-xr]

Technicalities - I think there's way too much room at the top of the first few, it's something that got repeated later on in the ones you put up. It's completely fine to crop heads, I do it a lot. Chins, I draw the line at, but I've cropped down to eyebrow level before and still got decent, slightly awkward feeling results.

I think there's more you could do on the edits, but I guess that'll come

With portraits, anything, above and beyond shutter speeds, preferred apertures, ISO settings, expressions. I'd take something slightly soft that has a wonderful feeling over a F11/125th perfect focus bland boring bag of bks. I think you've got some of the former in those you've posted. More like that! If you really watch an expression forming, it's like a curve or a wave. There's the initial awareness, then the facial muscles change, then the awareness of how much to show. Catching it at the right time can be luck really, but it's something to watch out for