I met a friend of mine and his beautiful family at the Botanic Gardens Saturday for an hour-long photo session. He's a close friend and pushed me to do it, knowing that I want to get into portrait photography eventually but have been hesitant about putting my toe in the water for the first time. Obviously, there's no way I would accept any payment, as the session was just as (or more) valuable to me for the experience as it was to them for the results. Overall, it was a great experience for everyone, and we did get a few good pictures out of it. Here are some samples...
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My biggest challenges were:
1. The little boy had a motor, and the little girl was very shy. To get him to sit still and her to look at me and smile was a task. Thus, the candid-to-setup shot was much higher than I anticipated.
2. Every bit of technical knowledge I had flew right out my head when I got frazzled chasing them around and trying to orchestrate things. #4 above was tremendously rescued by RAW processing - the shutter was too slow and there is quite a bit of motion blur if you look closely.
3. The lighting was tough to get right -- clear blue sky, so there were a lot of harsh shadows that I tried to lighten with my flash (420EX with a plastic diffuser cap), but the metering I got using Av (90% were taken using Av) didn't seem to hit the mark as much as I had hoped. And facing into the sunlight just leaves you with a lot of squinting.
Overall, I'm happy we got some good shots that they liked, but I know I can do better. Any and all comments and critiques you can offer are MUCH appreciated!
Thanks for looking!
Equipment used: Canon 40D, Canon 50mm f/1.8, Canon 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5, Speedlite 420EX
Post Processing: Canon Digital Photo Professional and/or Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta
