my first paid shoot, critique the exposure & processing

[katia]

hey guys, so i did my first paid shoot back in June. i know it's not top-notch, professional quality work or anything, but i sure had fun with the clients! i handed over the disk (of 4x6 images) to the clients just last week. we sat together in Starbucks and looked through them, they LOVED the images i provided, so i am really pleased.

i would like to share this image, which is one of my favorites from the shoot.


Lauren McIvor 033 by katiagphoto, on Flickr

EXIF:

Camera Nikon D90
Exposure 0.006 sec (1/160)
Aperture f/7.1
Focal Length 105 mm
ISO Speed 400
Exposure Bias -1/3 EV
Flash On, Return detected

i realize that her hat and dress are way overexposed, my bad. now that i look at the EXIF i'm sure ISO 400 was too much.

other than that, how could i have improved the exposure?

does the photo look over-processed to you?

anything else you'd like to critique on/point out, i would love to hear!

like i said this was my first paid shoot, 2nd portrait shoot ever. i am in the very baby stages of learning lighting, as well. definitely looking forward to learning more about it!

also for anybody interested, the rest of the shoot is here

[scootermcq]

Originally Posted by katia

i would like to share this image, which is one of my favorites from the shoot.

i realize that her hat and dress are way overexposed, my bad. now that i look at the EXIF i'm sure ISO 400 was too much.

other than that, how could i have improved the exposure?

does the photo look over-processed to you?

They are not blown out..... you can just select them with the quick selection tool, right click and select layer via copy. Now you just have the hat & dress in a layer. Reduce brightness or exposure to where you like it and flatten the image. Yes they are too bright and distracting, but not blown. You could have increased your shutter speed to kill a little more ambient light and/or closed the aperture a bit and let the flash do a bit more work.

I like the image, but it does look slightly over sharpened. It also looks like you tried to burn the dress down a bit in post, and you have darkened the water around the dress creating a halo. If you use quick selection tool, you will isolate the dress and not affect the area around it.

Here is an example with the hat and dress pulled down (wait, that did not sound right). Please don't be offended, this is for illustration only and I can delete it if you prefer.

[AdrenoJunkie]

If you shot this in RAW then you can adjust the recovery slider Camera Raw to bring back detail in the hat and dress. Or use a shadows highlights adjustment if it was shot jpeg. Scooter's right though, it's not blown out just overexposed.

[katia]

that edit you did scooter is excellent, i guess i'll just have to have another play with it later on; it was indeed shot in RAW

thanks guys!

[NikD300]

I really like the scooter version of the pic and I agree with his observations on whites being blow out and sharpness on the picture.

Originally Posted by scootermcq

They are not blown out..... you can just select them with the quick selection tool, right click and select layer via copy. Now you just have the hat & dress in a layer. Reduce brightness or exposure to where you like it and flatten the image. Yes they are too bright and distracting, but not blown. You could have increased your shutter speed to kill a little more ambient light and/or closed the aperture a bit and let the flash do a bit more work.

I like the image, but it does look slightly over sharpened. It also looks like you tried to burn the dress down a bit in post, and you have darkened the water around the dress creating a halo. If you use quick selection tool, you will isolate the dress and not affect the area around it.

Here is an example with the hat and dress pulled down (wait, that did not sound right). Please don't be offended, this is for illustration only and I can delete it if you prefer.

[katia]

I'm not sure I sharpened the pic, though if both of you think so I must have. I'm going to try to reprocess it when I get home

[scootermcq]

Originally Posted by katia

I'm not sure I sharpened the pic, though if both of you think so I must have. I'm going to try to reprocess it when I get home

It also could just be the jpg compression that is giving it the look of being over sharpened.

[G'Hopper]

According to Adobe Lightroom, how you treat the sharpening of pictures depends on what you intend to do with it.

If you intend to use the picture on the internet or in digital format only, less sharpening is required as it easily looks over-sharpened.
However, if you intend to print the shot, more sharpening can be done as the printer treats sharpening in a different way and it does not display the same as on screen.

The same goes for contrast. For digital display, I usually stop down my contrast quite considerably. I often find that digitally displayed shots on the internet are too contrasty.

[BexJarratt]

I can see why then loved them, the girls look really relaxed, well done! I love photo 101, I like how the shoes being positioned so far in front of where they're jumping makes it look like they've jumped about 2m off the ground.

[arkusm]

I took a look at your flickr stream and am curious why you would not shoot them wide open or near too wide open. I fair number of the shots would have benefited from the lowest aperture you could use to narrow the DoF and drop some of the distracting background elements like the light posts, random vehicles and such - the image above you had up to f2.8!
Not that that stuff could not be done in post but would be a significant amount of work.