Senior Pictures -- Critique please.

I was walking around at Tempe Town Lake and ran across a couple of girls taking pictures of each other with a point and shoot. I was taking some pics of the bridges there, and we started talking... they were doing their own little senior portraits with a point and shoot, cause they couldn't afford to get actual senior portraits done.

I offered to take some pictures for them, with no expectation of charge unless they liked them... and then all they had to do was refer friends to me so that I could continue developing my portfolio an getting experience.

So without further ado, here are my favorites of our impromptu session:

#1

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#2, 3, 4 and 5 are out of focus. Compositions are good. They would be better if you used a flash gun.

AlanZ wrote in post #13277273
#2, 3, 4 and 5 are out of focus. Compositions are good. They would be better if you used a flash gun.

Yeah, I'm having a hard time with my 50mm and the T2i's autofocus system. And yes, I would have loved to have a flash gun, or even a flash... but I was using what I had... my camera, the nifty fifty and some random ideas.


Thanks for the comment about the compositions, I sort of feel cheesy sometimes with my ideas. I'm glad that these worked.

I also suggest you use a single focus point(if you're not already) - focus on the eyes and recompose. I used to have lots of out of focus portrait shots, now most of my family photos are dead on the focus.

I'd say your main thing to work on is Focus. But picture number one seems to me that the subject is underexposed. Also the background in #2 is distracting. The light in picture #5 is distracting as it is the brightest thing in the picture.

2, 3 and 6 are the best of the bunch. Even with the background #2 is still pretty good. Adding some fill light to #1 should help it quite a bit and make it a decent shot. You might want to crop some of the blown sky in #2 out of the picture to help it.

Thanks. I guess I need to go center point AF and decompose like others have stated.

Gonna try those edits.

Not bad. Play with the pop up flash. It's not as useless as others claim it to be....

this is interesting...your webpage is seeingflashes.com BUT I don't see any LOL

Playing around with the first image and ran the exposure up to correct the girl. It blows out the background but gives an interesting image that I think is more appealing than the underexposed version.

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A quick edit on one:

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Don't use these in your portfolio and don't let the girls see them. It'll do more harm than good. No offense but this is the stuff that turns people off rather than on. They were probably getting better results with their point & shoots due to more inherent DoF and knowing each other on a more personal level.

Don't give up, just toss these and try again. Some of the poses do work, but your exposures and focus is all over the place. The lighting (particularly #1) isn't good at all. She's heavily backlit with nothing filling in from the front. Lacking a flash gun, what you want to do is keep the sky out of the frame and let the background go as bright as necessary to have her eyes exposed properly.

cdifoto wrote in post #13280212
Don't use these in your portfolio and don't let the girls see them. It'll do more harm than good. No offense but this is the stuff that turns people off rather than on. They were probably getting better results with their point & shoots due to more inherent DoF and knowing each other on a more personal level.

Don't give up, just toss these and try again. Some of the poses do work, but your exposures and focus is all over the place. The lighting (particularly #1) isn't good at all. She's heavily backlit with nothing filling in from the front. Lacking a flash gun, what you want to do is keep the sky out of the frame and let the background go as bright as necessary to have her eyes exposed properly.

Your opinion is that none of those are keepers?

st3venb wrote in post #13280334
Your opinion is that none of those are keepers?

#1 and #6 might be salvageable. The last one is unflattering (square to the camera = not good) and the rest are completely out of focus.

Being totally new, it might be worth keeping 1 and 6 so you have something but the rest - definitely not.

cdifoto wrote in post #13280415
#1 and #6 might be salvageable. The last one is unflattering (square to the camera = not good) and the rest are completely out of focus.

Being totally new, it might be worth keeping 1 and 6 so you have something but the rest - definitely not.

Thank you.


I'm really frustrated with the AF system on my t2i, it seems as though I should go back to centerpoint and recompose a lot.

Anyone have tips for making the AF work better for you during these types of shots, so there is less shuffling / recomposing to work around a camera that can't reliably find focus?