Sunny image from my first D80 shoot

[Goofyboy]

Hi everyone,

This is my first time here and I would be really glad to get any critique. This is from my first photoshoot with my Nikon D80.



Model: NIKON D80
ISO: 800
Exposure: 1/1000 sec
Aperture: 5.6
Focal Length: 48mm
Flash Used: No

The photo was shot late in the afternoon with the sun going down. No artificial light at all in the shot and no post-processing, this is out of the camera.

[graciousness]

Hi Eric and welcome to DPS,

What a gorgeous model! I think that the photo is nice enough, however, there are a few issues, I think, from it being a great photo.

1. Whilst I do understand and like the idea of her sitting against yellow daisies to match her dress and minimise colours in the photo, the execution is flawed. She is squishing the plants with her back, making the plants look awkward and well, squished, and unnatural. A better spot where she could have sat on the ledge without having her fight against the plants would have been better.

The flowers are actually distracting and taking away focus from your subject. They needed to be blurry (foreground and background wise) so that they are not stealing limelight from your model, ESP they have the same bright colour as her dress. Remember that eyes will go to the lightest part of a scene and the flowers and her dress are the lightest.

The flowers are too close to her face and they are casting shadows on her face. I think she should have brought her face out instead of tucked her chin in which hid her more in the daisy bushes.

I think you really could have used more depth of field here - maybe around 4.0 so that her face is more centrally in focus and more of everything else would have been blurred. What mode did you use to take the photo with? I know you mentioned that it was taken around sundown, but ISO of 800 seems a bit high?

I'm glad that you are happy with the photo that you felt you didn't need to put it through post processing. However, I do advice that you should have a play with doing a bit of post processing and see if you can improve the photo. I do find the overall tone just a tad bit too red, esp around her face and neck area and could use some toning down.

Anyhoo, I think I've written enough and I probably killed a few of your brain cells. I hope I've been a little bit of help. Congrats on your new purchase, by the way and have fun! You know you're only going to get better the more you snap

Thanks for sharing and good job!

Cheers,

Grace

[Goofyboy]

Wow! Thanks Grace. I didn't expect a full review like this!

I do agree with all you said and after looking at the picture a bit more, I totally understand what you mean about the flowers being "skished". But believe it or not, she's not even touching them, except the ones she's sitting on. We missed those. We chose that spot because there was a natural hole in the bush for some reason!

Since this shoot was my first with the D80, I didn't play around with the settings enough. Iso was set to auto. I could have used a 200 maximum with the light we had. Also, the lens I had was not the best for depth of field. I now own a 50mm, 1.8. That would've helped on that day a lot!

I will post more in the coming days.

Thanks a lot!