Some Portraits
This last week, I practiced using the studio lights at the school to get some portraits.
This first one is of Zack Thornton. He came in and wanted a photo of himself for a friend… So I took him to the studio and got some shots. The first ones had some problems. One of which was that one of the strobes wasn’t firing. I posted some of those pictures below, just to show the problems.
EXIF:
- Shutter: 1/100 sec
- Aperture: f/8.0
- ISO: 100
- Lens: 50mm f/1.8 II
The first photo I took (of Zack) really was just to get a nice professional looking portrait. There are no special effects… No photoshop… no funny props… Nothing. Just a good pro portrait. This could be an id card photo… maybe.
Next, I went on to get some photos of Jared Pierson. I saw this fancy bamboo plant and was inspired to shot some photos… so I did. I suppose I could use my brother’s site as a influence… since he used the same bamboo plant for a portrait of Brandon.
This photo was really just shot spontaneously. Jared came into the class and I was practicing some strobe related things, and I just shot this photo. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the synch cable or pocket wizard, so I just used my on-camera flash to trigger the strobes. This photo, had a little more creativity involved. But it really isn’t a top notch photo, just something unique. I did some selective color, some unsharp mask, and other Photoshop magic.
EXIF:
- Shutter: 1/60th
- Aperture: f/4
- ISO: 400
- Lens: Canon 50mm f/1.8
- On-camera flash: forced
Next, my brother, Stephen, was in my room, and I just took some quick photos of him. Below are some of the results.
These photos were shot using strobes, at my house. I was experimenting with lighting ratios, and getting good looking portraits as practice for SkillsUSA. In Photoshop, there is a RAW conversion, then I did some levels, unsharp mask, highlights and shadows (just a little though, too much looks bad), and some cloning.
Finally here are some mistakes, rejects, before-and-afters and the contact sheet:
