First Family Portrait Shoot

[clbegis]

Hey there, new to the site and fairly new to photography. I wanted to share a couple of pics from my first shoot. Starting with a friend of the family and I thought that they came out well.

In the first pic, if I had seen it, I would have centered the head a bit more. There has been minimal editing to the pics. Just some brightness adjustments. Need to work on adjustments when I learn how.

Please provide C&C.

Thanks!

[CaptainTom]

Welcome to TPF.
I'll give a couple of observations about your images.

1- using a wide open lens gives that nice out of focus background and allows a faster shutter speed. Good work.
2- when doing close up portraits it makes a much better photo if there are some "catchlights" in the subjects eyes. There are a lot of ways to do this so I'll let you do some internet research.
3- lining the subjects up shoulder to shoulder is pretty mundane and boring.
Try adding a little depth to the image. Be careful that your DOF covers the distance.
4- they look a little "soft" , but this is likely caused by reducing them to a size acceptable on this forum. Are you using sharpening ? Any post production done ? the 40D is designed to gather a lot of information, but you have to use some post processing to maximize the image.

[texkam]

Welcome. You've come to the right place. You'll learn a lot here if you can put up with some of our shenanigans from time to time. There are a lot of talented folks that post some wonderful images and take the time to explain (some even with diagrams) their lighting set up. Our search feature and of course Google can help with a lot of questions too and YouTube can be a great source for learning how to use photo editing software. So sit back, look, read, post, ask and enjoy.

[Bella Pop]

yay! congrats on your first shoot! I remember my first shoot - good times :) First, you did a great job capturing light in the first two images. Also, you did great shooting from above (posing) in the third image. The third image is a bit over-exposed in the face and it looks like the focus points focused in on her hair.

here's a good tip - when shooting portraits of people always stay at least 1/125 shutter speed or faster. People naturally move (even when they are trying to stay still - such as breathing and blinking) so shooting anything under 1/100 will result in softer images of people. I started out with a 40D it's a fabulous camera. You can easily up the ISO and keep your shutter speed a bit faster when shooting people. Hope this helps!

- Brandy