Post Your Best Portrait Shots!

[powers_brent]

Me just messing around. Not the best, but yeah.





Canon Rebel XS with Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 @ f/8.0, 1/50th, ISO 400


Strobist Info: Canon 430EXII shoot thru high camera left @ 1/2 power and Kodak P20 zoomed to 80mm bare behind subject right @ 1/8 power. All triggered by CTR-301P's


RAW to tiff and edited in photoshop. Contrast and saturation raised 10. Added type obviously. Sharpened.

[Scott]

[Sean Setters]

Here's a couple of shots from today's session:

[ddt0725]

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[Sean Setters]

CHEESE!!

[adrian mandea]

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[lespurs]

[View:http://www.pbase.com/bugso/image/122723849:0:640]

[ddt0725]

Quick shot of my son as he breezed in and outta here as usual!

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C&C Welcome!

Thanks,
Denise

[Mark Elberson]

Hey Denise,


Glad you could find yourself a willing model :-) What was your setup. It looks like it could use a tad more exposure but that may just be my screen at work. This is just taste but I would try to find a way to get some separation of subject and background. He kind of melts away into the darkness. That may have been what you were going for though. Maybe play with the crop a little too. If you're going to keep it a landscape then I would prefer to see the dead space to the right of him as opposed to the left. Portrait orientation may look nice too.


Keep up the good work and keep shooting! I've really seen a nice progression in your photography over the past couple of months :-)

[jkt]

Hi, this is my first post on this forum. I've been shooting with Panasonic LX-2 for a few years, and moved to Canon 500D with kit lens this fall. Since then, I've bought a 50mm 1.8 II, a 430EX-II flash and recently a 17-55 2.8 IS USM (which was the best thing I could've done). I don't have any fancy lighting kit, not even a wireless transmitter, but I do try to follow Neil van Niekerk and his advices about using on-camera bounce flash. Last weekend, my lens was generating a bit of an attention which I decided to abuse a bit and get a nice girl to pose (I read some posing tips the other day, and I managed to remember a few points). We both have zero experience with that, so the image has a few flaws I'm aware of (chopped hand, I should've arranged her fingers to be visible):


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The setup -- 17-55 at 43mm, Manual mode (for control of the lighting), F/2.8 (for the DOF), 1/50s (I wanted some ambient light to register), ISO 800 (arbitrary value, I didn't want to hammer the flash too much and ISO 1600 seemed too much), on-camera flash in TTL, no flash exposure compensation, bounced up and to the right (the 430EX-II won't rotate more than 90° to the right, so I'm pretty sure it was aiming just to the right and about 60° up). Shoot RAW, but the camera got the WB right in this case. The "venue" was a hall in an old (pre-WW1) house in a village, about 2 meters wide, dark brown wooden ceiling and one wall, the other wall which I bounced from was painted white with some obstacles like doors. RAW->JPEG converted in Canon's Digital Photo Pro running under Wine in Linux, cropped. Further PP in the Gimp, adjusted levels of the red on the face, some cosmetic retouching (eyes, teeth, skin blemishes), skin softening, added vignetting, eye & hair sharpening. This was the first time I was PPing a shot, so it took me about two hours .


The flaws I'm aware of:

• Weird position of the right hand -- the elbow looks kinda strange here (or doesn't it?)
• Palm and fingers are not visible, that's a pity IMHO
• Some disturbing background stuff on the very right

Still, I was really happy when a strobist friend of mine nodded "hey, nice window lighting" when he saw the shot for the first time, and was rather surprised to hear that it was an on-camera TTL flash . Any suggestions about how to improve stuff are welcome.