first 'studio' work, cc please

i did my first shoot with a friend. 60" softliter umbrella with a 420ex flash, white reflector. 50mm f/1.4 lens, canon 10d.

i realized after the shoot, i had her turn towards the reflector instead of turning towards the umbrella... i think it's better when they turn towards the flash right?

also, the bg is not as out of focus as i would have liked because i have a small room so when she was standing, i had to get further away from her so she had to stand nearer the bg. i probably could have dropped from f/8 to f/5.6 or f/4 to get a little more blur.


EDIT: oh, i also did the local contrast enhancement using unsharpmask 20% radius 50. i think they turned out a little too sharp/contrasty so i think 10% would have been better. only other adjustments was to sharpen in Caputure One and add about 4% increase in saturation. I also used C1 to bring the highlight level handle down to the left a bit.

I think they're nice photos. First off, she's very pretty, and looks comfortable in front of you/camera. I hope to see more shots of her. The direction she's facing gets into the shortlighting/broadlig​hting issue that was just discussed...check my posts for the topic. Not sure how far away the light is, but get it as close as possible and as low-power as possible. That makes the light source appear larger, and softer.

That's very good for first work, love the pose on 8490. One suggestion is to get the light a bit higher, so more light into the eyes.

You could have used a reflector to camera right to toss a little more light on her left side and take the shadows away. Other that that they are all keepers good job!

ootsk - will do, thanks.

lotto and goforphoto - thanks. i did have a reflector camera right. the flash/umbrella was camera left. i should have had her turn towards the flash rather than towards the reflector. otherwise i think i need to experiment more with the reflector, closer, different angles maybe.

the flash was within 6' and the reflector was within about 4'. my alternative was to use two identical flash/umbrellas (i actually have 3 420ex and two 60" softliter umbrellas) and used the STE2 to set the ratios. for whatever reason i didn't do that. - next time!

what i'm finding is that there is a whole bunch of things you can play with! different heights of the light, closer, further, angles front and back etc... this lighting thing is fun.

Nice work. I am just getting into portraits and hope my first work looks that good.

TMR Design wrote in post #2324385
Nice work. I am just getting into portraits and hope my first work looks that good.

thanks! i'm sure yours will! most of what i learned i learned on these forums.