Engagement Shoot #1

Okay, here's the engagement shoot I was talking about before. I think it ended up going pretty well, it was a lot of fun. None of the posed shots turned out that well, because they were right, neither of them have good "camera smiles." I mostly stuck to just letting them interact and picking out the good moments, that's much more my style anyways.

So here are a couple of my favorites, comments and criticism very very welcome!

Hi Emmy,

Those are terrific for your first time. Only thing that is missing is the "pop" in the photos. They are flat.....REALLY flat. Try an S curve and some sharpening in PS and that would do the trick. I dont want to touch, since im not sure how you feel about editing. Where are your pix taken? I like that sculpture.

The mood that you feel when looking at this is fantastic- you did a great job with that. As mentioned maybe a smidge of PP would go a long way in making the color as good as the mood.

Oh please, feel free to edit. Just make sure you tell me what you did!

You need to go to our profile and click on allow editing or somethign like that, but since you said its ok I went ahead and bumped the levels and sharpened, I also made a tighter crop on the first but since I am working with complressed images the quality suffered.

I love that last one. With a little contrast/brightening, this will be a winner.

The rest are very nice as well. In second place (it's all relative, these are nice shots!!) is, I think, #2. Again, just a little pop and it's there!

Edit: The edited photos were put up while I was typing. That's what I'm talking about!

Alright, editing permission granted. Sorry, I didn't realize I had that off.

Thanks for the editing, though, that definitely does look better. If anyone wants to see the rest of the shots, I have them up on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com …e/sets/72157594​424637404/

There are a couple of funny ones, they even wanted to take some "prom pictures," which are the last two in the set. But hopefully, that's obvious.

I very rarely post up any edits to people's files, but I REALLY like these shots and I think with some cropping and processing, the whole set could be amazing in my opinion. Here's my take on them, just a little different than skrim17's vision.

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And I added one more pic from your flickr gallery because I really liked it and thought it could look good in the blown-crossed look. (cropped the pole from the pic)

So great work on the shoot. Add a bit of processing to your workflow, or crank up the saturation and contrast on your camera, compose the shot a with a little more though, and you're golden!
Good work.

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Whoah there picturecrazy, I thing that the contrast and saturation are too much. The originals really needed some pop, but that may be overkill

Well, it all depends what you're going for. If you're going for dramatic, then go dramatic. If you are going for simple and clean, go simple and clean. I figured if I was gonna run some actions on these, I'd go for the processed look instead. (I wouldn't do ALL the photos like this)

When vibrant colours are the theme, then I say, make it vibrant. It's a style preference and that's why it's so great to share and see everybody's different styles, which may be way off your own.

I typically use this kind of colouring for Fall engagement/weddings/po​rtraits because that's what the couples are looking for at that time of year... big, bold, vibrant colours. And they all love it. For winter & snow pics, I actually tend to desaturate instead.

What's wrong with natural? Make your blacks black and your whites white and stop at that.

Pretty good shots, but the backgrounds would be better as blurry colours in the BG ... get closer and do weirder angles ... that's a cool venue though.

Thanks everybody. I think Skrim's edit are more my style, but the other ones are fun too. When I first started doing photography, I went a little overboard on the contrast, so I'm leery of it and now tend to err on the side of caution. But yeah, I do agree the original shots were very flat.

bpuppy wrote in post #2421204
What's wrong with natural? Make your blacks black and your whites white and stop at that.

There's absolutely NOTHING wrong with that. Many of my delivered shots are like that. There's also nothing wrong with having a play with something a little off-the-beaten-path.

Which is why I rarely post images here, as my style is different than most here would consider 'proper'. The thing is, brides contact me BECAUSE I don't care about what is 'standard'. (Sometimes reading potn reminds me of chatting with a room full of Brooks students)

I'm just saying to the OP, your pictures are great, I really like them, and wanted to play and show the different styles that can be applied to the same shots.

While I'm at it, might as well post another unacceptable edit. (Reminds me of the good old darkroom days with high grain film)

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I like that edit picture crazy. I don't think that one way fits all, in fact I like a wide variety of edits. I just like skin tones to appear natural. If I do a high contrast edit for style I like to desaturate the color as I feel that it helps to keep things in line. I'm no expert, and I love as much color as you can squeeze out of an image, I just like things to remain somewhat natural looking. Or, something like your last edit that has changed the tonal value of the entire image to something more uniform. Although they say that opinions are like.....