My Girlfriend

[dande]

My first experiment with portraits. I am very interested in photographing people, and I've also heard that people usually are a very hard subject, so I am absolutely open to suggestions, and comments. The picture was not yet post-processed, it is as-is came out of the camera. It was shot on a very cold day.

[morganfam7]

The color of the sky is gorgeous!

I'm not sure what look you are going for, but my thoughts are that the face needs more light for definition. How about cropping close around your gf? Maybe cropping some of the top of her hat out of the picture to draw your eyes more to the face rather than the contrast between the blue and the hood.

If, on the other hand, you are making a statement about how cold it is, I think the sky above her head and around her does a good job speaking "cold." It feels isolated and cold to me.

That's my newbie ideas whatever they are worth! lol

[jdepould]

did you use fill flash? if not, it's something worth trying. you'd be able to keep the rich blue sky and get some better skin tones (not that these are bad).

[trelaflip]

for it being a quick snap shot and with what you had available to you at the time i think it turned out pretty good. fill flash though would of made a huge difference.

that sun looks pretty bright. did you grab and silhouettes?

[wulf]

It has several odd features such as positioning the face in the centre of the frame, the plain background and the limited lighting from the front. Odd is not necessarily bad but those would be areas to address to get a more "normal" style of portraiture (and get your girlfriend to smile - she looks a bit severe in this photo and a smile softens the face).

On the other hand, it would be interesting to see a collection of several portraits all done with the same stylistic features. That would start to move them from looking like shots where you are breaking the rules to ones that look like they have a sense of purpose.

Wulf

[dande]

Hi, wow! Thanks for all the replies. It really helps a lot. I've tried fill flash at that day, but it I had the feeling, that the portrait "pops out" of the photo, don't know how to describe that precisely. But I don't have external flash, just the plain built-in one, but I did created a DIY Flash Diffuser for the popup flash.
What kind of setting would you guys use, when using flash?
Wulf: where would you position the face?

[wulf]

Originally Posted by dande

Wulf: where would you position the face?

I would be thinking of things like the "rule of 3rds" - see the sticky thread at the top of the composition section for some background reading material.

Typically a portrait would tend to have the subject's face larger in the frame, angled rather than straight on and not dead centre of the picture.

Wulf