Male Portrait II

[Digital]

Although C&C welcomed, this is not the primary purpose of this thread.

1) The background was changed. I can not find any artifacts. The background was changed due to the fact that the original background, to put it very simply "stank". This could have been easily avoided by placing the subject in a more suitable location. This will also avoid PP in this regard. I have learned to get it right the first time, and not rely on PP to correct your mistakes.

2). There is glare on the glasses due to frontal flat lighting. I hope to avoid this (frontal flat lighting) in the future since I am planning to bounce the light to subject's left or right side off of a white reflector avoiding some direct frontal flash by using a black foamie thing (BFT). By using a white reflector, I hope to avoid color casts from the wall.

3) I believe I could have posed the subject better; however by the expression on his face I had him engaged with the shoot.

4) There are catch lights in the eyes.

5) the exposure is to hot.

The purpose of this small exercise was to become more critical of my own portraits so I can avoid making the same mistakes, and as a result came up with a whole new batch of mistakes to make.

Feel free to come up with any positive or negative comments regarding this photo, although, as stated above, this was not the primary purpose of this thread.

Bruce

[lovelife65]

Nice looking young man.
Also great job critiquing your own work. I fully agree on getting things done well to avoid PP.
Only other comment is there’s a weird blemish on the background just above his collar on my left side.

[rpcrowe]

Bruce, I was wondering what focal length at which this was shot. My EXIF downloader doesn't seem to work on my Chromebook...

[Manfred M]

Bruce - two significant artifacts where the arrows are.

On the left side, there is something you did not remove. The one on the right side shows a lot of transparency and strange colouration where there shouldn't be any.

[Digital]

Sharon, thank you for your very kind comments.

Richard, this pic was shot at 50mm.

Manfred, thanks for pointing out the artifacts. I completely missed them. Attempted to clean these artifacts - see below.
As stated in my critique, picking an appropriate background is dependent on the photographer using good judgment- not relying on PP to clean up his mess.

Bruce

BTW: on this shot removed hot spots off face, and lowered the exposure.

[Manfred M]

Bruce - the good thing is that your analytical skills are evolving and you are seeing the problems when you review your images. Unfortunately, only the most obvious and glaring issues can be seen on the small screen on the back of your camera.

It may seem I am stating the obvious, but the photographer has to see the whole scene, not just the subject in order to get a good, strong image. Learning to do that is not trivial. One place to start getting this skill is to scan all around the edge of the frame before you press the shutter release. This takes a second or two, but you'll be surprised what this will do for your photography.

Another point is that it is usually easier to get things right in the camera than trying to fix things in PP. Your background replacement is an obvious example here. The replacement background has to look realistic and fit with the lighting in the shot. That takes a lot more work that just popping a gradient in. If you look carefully, you will see that the background and subject don't seem to fit together.

[Digital]

Manfred, I could not agree with you more. As I related in my self critique of this photo is that it is best to correct any problems with the photo prior to releasing the shutter rather than correcting in PP.
The suggestion that you view the ENTIRE scene thru the viewfinder is a good one, and I plan to make this a habit in my photography.
Finally, I changed the background to a more uniform color which, I trust, is more suitable.

Bruce

[Manfred M]

The latest version has artifacts along the hair line and along the shirt.

[Digital]

The latest version has artifacts along the hair line and along the shirt.

Manfred, I am not going to correct the artifacts since this is not my purpose for this thread. I am hoping to avoid this element of this software in the future by being more selective in choosing appropriate backgrounds. I want to improve my analytical skills prior to taking the picture, avoiding a lot of "clean up" in PP. This was the intention of this particular thread.
A number of the pics I posted on CiC were taken in 2015 when I first got into taking "portraits". My later shots (some were posted here) were shot against a plain colored wall.
I have included a pic on what the original background looked like for pics taken in 2015.

Bruce