Showcasing StreetStyleMO

[mgco]

This was launched quite recently, so any positive critique is appreciated. And of course, your support highly sought after. Thank you, Cambridge in Colour!

[Manfred M]

My general comment is that your subjects look fine, but with a couple of exceptions, the backgrounds are very busy and distracting and that takes away from the images.

Rather than showing a whole website, you will find that you get better comments here when you post one or two images at a time and ask for comments on them.

Showing the images here in the post (I personally use Flickr), rather than having a link to your website would definitely be worth considering.

[DanK]

I agree with Manfred. I think two things contribute to the backgrounds being distracting. One is that you seem to have used a narrow aperture, giving you a large depth of field. For example, in the second and fourth photos, is it helpful to have the people to the left of the subject nearly in focus? Or the sign to the right in the third photo?

This is partly a matter of intent. Large depth of field makes sense in some environmental portraits, where the setting is important. I don't think those people contribute in that respect, but that's a matter for you to decide.

The second reason is lighting. If it were me, I would want a difference in brightness between the subject and the background to help the subject stand out. You have that in the first--the background is much brighter--but the effect is undone by the two people to the left. In the last and third to last, the background is substantially darker, so that works for me. but in some others, you have equally bright lighting and high contrast colors in the backgrounds, which is distracting. In those cases, you can fix it up in post-processing, e.g., by burning and in some cases desaturating the backgrounds.

I hope this helps.

[mgco]

Thank you for your comments, Manfred and Dank

[DanK]

PS: you can do a lot to address the two issues I raised quite simply in Lightroom. To create a narrower depth of field, use the lens blur option in the develop panel. To get more separation based on brightness, tell LR to create a mask by selecting the subject. Then invert the mask and darken or lighten the background to taste. You'd have to go online for instructions on how to do this, but once you've tried them, they are both simple and quick.

[Manfred M]

While I agree with Dan that this would be one way to fix the images that you have posted.

I would suggest more care in posing and positioning your subjects in a way that the background is less distracting is something you might want to consider as you continue to build your portfolio. Just because the background elements are not 100% sharp does not mean that they are not distracting.

[DanK]

I entirely agree with Manfred. But I wouldn’t discard images that have these problems without trying to fix them. I mostly do candids rather than posed shots, so I rarely have really good backgrounds and often have really bad ones. With a little work plan I’ve turned some of those into good images regardless.


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