New to Photography

Hello everyone I am new to photography and have been playing around and was hoping to get some ideas on what I could do to improve my pictures. A little about my equipment is a Canon Digital XTI with a 28-135 IS and a set of Novatron lights. Any comments are welcomed.

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The backdrop that you are using is doing the job, but it does look a little bit too much like just a gray sheet hanging there.

Notice the rather deep shadow under the chin in your second shot.

Otherwise, both shots are excellent portraits - although a little too dark for my taste.

If you would like to take a more structured approach to studio lighting, look at the following:

*************Studio Portrait Lighting**************​*
Tutorial on Studio Portrait Lighting Using Two Lights, with Emphasis on Rembrandt Lighting:
http://www.zaffora.com​/W9DMK/PortraitLightin​g.htm
or the downloadable PDF version at:
http://www.zaffora.com​/W9DMK/PortraitLightin​g.pdf

Also see this helpful reference:
http://en.wikipedia.or​g/wiki/Rembrandt_light​ing

Overall, they're dark for my taste too... given you have IS, you could have exposed a stop or two brighter (assuming you didn't already expose to the right and deliberately reduce the exposes this much). Otherwise good. The soft toy on the head does make for a very long thin shot... I think it would have worked better over his left shoulder, allowing a tighter framing around his face, and placing his eyes in a higher impact position towards the top, rather than around the middle of, the frame.

In the second one, I like the posture but might have put him a touch further right in the frame - as is it's a bit central. I can't help wondering if it wouldn't look better with another 10% in frame at the bottom... seeing half a hand is kind of distracting. The necklace thing being over the design on the T-shirt is also a little distracting... the former on a plain T-shirt, or the latter alone, might work better. The backdrop seems noisy (I know you shot ISO100 so it's weird - maybe JPEG quality factor for posting here, some grain in the backdrop, increased exposure in post-processing...).

Cheers, Tony

My first suggetion is to move your subjects away from the background. You want a couple of feed minimum between the subject and background -- more if you have the room.