Looking for feedback regarding this portrait. Want tips on how I can make my photography better and how to bring the best out of this model.
Looking for feedback regarding this portrait. Want tips on how I can make my photography better and how to bring the best out of this model.
A pretty girl, but a blue cast to the picture. Try using a higher colour temperature to your white balance, say 6000 degrees kelvin. I suspect this is more like 4000 degrees kelvin. The light is too hard, guessing you used a flash gun without diffuser. So we have very hard and sharp shadows. Her eyes look over edited, they are too white. She is off centre with very little looking room to the right. The background looks well handled. The overal exposure is about right, a tad too dark, but close and a reflector or soft low powered kicker behind her, to brighten her hair would have helped. This all sounds like a terrible damnation but it still works, to a point. Your light is well positioned, although I would likely have had it a bit higher and if possible I would have slightly darkened the room so her eyes dilate a bit more. The main things are the blue cast and the slight darkness and the framing with her to the right rather than to the left, where she would have balanced better. It is nearly there.
Another version with a big smile and some fun/excitment might have been good, too.
I think you should pay careful attention to the the placement of your light (distance from subject, direction), to make a more flattering light. Looks like this is even with her face at best, probaby lower judging by the catchlight. So you get that shadow of her shoulder against her hair and the light generally raking up her face as opposed to down.
Also the crop seems a little off, I'd think you'd want her face more to the left. Or you can keep it on the right but it still seems off, even if you wanted that off balance look.
Have you retouched her skin at all? By all means I like a natural look to the skin as opposed to that glassy shiny look but she could certainly use some work.
Definitely everything that Ian and Jordan said, but IMO the light height would be the biggest factor. Getting the main light higher, at least above her eyes, would make a big difference.
Lighting & Skin Retouching are going to be the two biggest factors in making or breaking an image. Suggestion: read up on free resources such as YouTube & Retouched Academy for improving on these technical aspects for high impact images.
Thanks for the CCs they are really going to help me going forward. Ian: About light, all I had with me was a grid and bare flash (speedlight). As for the off center positioning, this was intentional as I wanted a bit of dead space and not have her right in the middle of the frame.....(maybe it didn't work, LOL) I knew the positioning of the light was not great, but I was shooting in a foyer with a fairly low ceiling so I couldn't put my light up higher. Jordan: Regarding the retouching of her skin, I think I could have benefited from having a MUA as she did her own makeup but you wouldn't believe how shiny her skin was, so I did do some retouching to take out the skin glare. If you had seen the original you would have thought I did a good job, LOL But in thinking about it, a softbox would have helped greatly with the shiny skin. I have to bring more modifiers in the future.