First Shot With Flash

[ascott]

This was the results of my first shot with two flashguns. For this shot I used a shoot through umbrella to highlight the BG and left side of the face and a softbox umbrella on the right to lift any shadows.

40D, Canon 70-200, FL 200mm, Av f/5.6, Tv 1/60, ISO200, Manual Mode, Manual Flash.

C&C welcome

[Nomadr]

nice colours and nice smile from the model, if i was shooting portrait i would use a smaller F stop, especially at 200mm, F8 at least ( jiust to include tip of the nose and ears when focusing on the eyes). its a good first try tho alex, not sure why its soft around the left hand side as we look at it ? i would have thought there would be two catchlights in her eyes ?
the shadows are deeper on the right but that doesnt take anything away from the image, composition wise i would try and get at least one eye on a thirds cross point,
in any portrait the first thing that people look at are the eyes, the second is the mouth, if you can draw the viewer in by having something of great interest on a thirds cross point then you halfway there, one thing to note is that if you had included the models chin then her eye would have been near enough on a crossover,
its just stuff to bear in mind, great first try,cheers martyn

[Colin Southern]

Hi Alex,

A few quick thoughts ...

1. Did you do any tooth whitening? A common technique is to build a masked HSB layer and desaturate the yellows by around 30 to 60% - but - one must then compensate by raising the brightness of all channels by around 5 to 8% ... to me, it doesn't look like you've done this last part, and thus the teeth look wonderfully "spectrally neutral", but somewhat grey.

2. This is a hard one, but it's highly desireable to get the subject using less makeup. This amount may well me appropriate in every day, but for modeling (in my opinion) it's too much. Too much foundation - too much blush - too much eye liner. It also makes it difficult to properly colour correct the portraiture because the foundation isn't the same colour as skin. It's something that makes them nervous - especially considering that they've probably had a LOT of bad photos taken of them in the past - and (women especially) are also very concerned about their looks). I explain to them how we're going to use soft lighting - and retouch any imperfections in Photoshop - and just encourage them to bring their makeup with them, but to none-the-less start with only a little mascara.

3. Personally, I like to run about a 3:1 contrast ratio with female models - this one looks closer to 1:2 or 1:1.5 - I think it needs a little bit more to give the face a bit more character, especially considering that a tightly-cropped frontal view is always going to be a bit challenging. Also, the flatter the lighting, the more weight it'll add to the face, which works OK with super-skinny (did I say "anorexic") models, but usually not the most flattering for normal people. If anything (with white backgrounds), run the contrast ratio a bit higher, and rely on the fill light control in ACR to adjust it to where you want it. With a black background, go the opposite way (and control it using the black clipping point control).

Hope this helps