Night Outdoors City (philly)

[ChrisAdval]

Khimaira 02 by Chris Adval, on Flickr [EXIF]

Camera: Canon EOS REBEL T2i
Exposure/Shutter: 0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture: f/3.2
Focal Length: 50 mm
ISO Speed : 200
Exposure Program: Manual
Exposure Mode: Manual
White Balance: Auto
Lens: EF50mm f/1.8 II

Post Processing and Lighting Notes: I smoothed out her skin using a new method I'm playing with which are using multiple tools such as clone, healing brush, and blur tool in photoshop cs5. Took me hours to clean up the chest and another hour I think on the face, the lighting situation didn't help as it was soften a bit with a diffuser on my speedlight but not soft enough to hide away imperfections.

Asking for overall critique

[graciousness]

That lighting is harsh. Too harsh.

Her face and chest almost look ashen to me and they are way too overdone. I'm so sorry to say that just because you spent hours on it......hard, I know. But if you need to actually fix something for that long in post processing, it's not worth it.

That pose is not flattering at all, esp her face. It's not flattering to have chin tucked in with photos - the only thing saving her from having double chin with such facial pose is that she's really skinny. She's got beautiful long neck and I would have had her chin up to elongate her neck even more. You want to really feature the prettiest assets of the model when taking photos.

That background is not doing anything for me, am afraid. That iron fencing is even worse

Did you use direct camera flash?? She's really flatly lit...

[scootermcq]

For me, this one is a miss....

Her color is very cold, being placed on a warm background. Does not match. Balancing the speedlight with a gel might have helped.
Lighting on the model is flat. Need further off camera axis
Catch lights are dead center in the eyes, not at 11 or 2:00
Model is underexposed, but has a hotspot in center of forehead
Not sure what it is, but there is something growing out of her head
Dark area in the frame keeps me trying to peer into the darkness, not look at the model
The models pose also feels awkward and the crop right at the knee joint appears off

[graciousness]

Damn, you have good eyes, Scott! I can't see the photo that well!

I think I've been editing for too long tonight

[ChrisAdval]

Thanks for the critique guys!

The flash was on camera (speedlight), couldn't do any off-camera or bounce it anywhere, I didn't bother trying to direct it off the subject as I wouldn't have enough light on the subject.

[bigben6]

agree with above, i like the lighting frame right, wish you could have gotten simmilar light on your subject. Might have salvaged alot fo this one.

[Niresangwa]

You know something Chris? This is one of those times when shooting in Auto and TTL flash would have been something you should have done, at least until you learn how to shoot at night to combine both the low level ambient and your flash...

Why would you shoot at 200iso at night, especially with such low levels of ambient artificial light? Of all of your settings, with that lens, the only one that's in the ball park with a single on-camera unit is the shutterspeed, which you probably could have dropped a touch lower... the real ding-dong setting for me though is the iso.

How did you meter this?

Now, am I advocating using auto all the time? Of course not, but I"ll bet you a pound to a pinch of pig poop that it would have gotten closer to a cleaner more balanced exposure than you managed. Then you can attenuate it to your tastes. Not really any different to chimping a shot or two when you're trying to balance lighting any other time.

I"m not sure either how your camera handles higher ISO's but I"m pretty sure you could have gone up some.

[scootermcq]

And the best catch phrase of 2011 goes to..........

Originally Posted by Niresangwa

I"ll bet you a pound to a pinch of pig poop

[ChrisAdval]

Originally Posted by Niresangwa

You know something Chris? This is one of those times when shooting in Auto and TTL flash would have been something you should have done, at least until you learn how to shoot at night to combine both the low level ambient and your flash...

Why would you shoot at 200iso at night, especially with such low levels of ambient artificial light? Of all of your settings, with that lens, the only one that's in the ball park with a single on-camera unit is the shutterspeed, which you probably could have dropped a touch lower... the real ding-dong setting for me though is the iso.

How did you meter this?

Now, am I advocating using auto all the time? Of course not, but I"ll bet you a pound to a pinch of pig poop that it would have gotten closer to a cleaner more balanced exposure than you managed. Then you can attenuate it to your tastes. Not really any different to chimping a shot or two when you're trying to balance lighting any other time.

I"m not sure either how your camera handles higher ISO's but I"m pretty sure you could have gone up some.

I could have, I'm just very anti-grain even with noise reduction techniques they bother me. Anything higher than 800 ISO for shooting people is trash to me, unless the subject isn't a person shooting at 1200-3200 is ok, but anything higher is trash. During this shoot I preferred to use as much as I possibly could from the flash without using much ISO, 200 was the lowest I could get it without maxing out the power on the flash for each shot.

As for shooting in auto, i.e. shutter priority, maybe, but then it will auto ISO for me to 6400 every time.... unusable for me. And, it would auto put the aperture to 1.8 (lowest on the lens), that was too soft for shooting a person especially for environmental portraits. I was trying to get the highest level aperture as much as possible without maxing out the power on my flash plus having the ISO to the lowest levels possible at the same time. Manual was my only option, and I would never use aperture priority in a low light setting here as it would auto shoot it at 10-30 seconds or whatever like that and completely crap the shot as I was hand holding the camera. But Thanks for the critique I'll play with shutter priority and see if the camera knows not to use 6400 ISO.

And metering, was trail and error of doing a test shot of the new scene I was in with the strob as I was moving around a lot it was somewhat pointless to use a light meter and couldn't use the in-camera meter if I was using a strob. So I picked a level of power of flash output and estimated the amount of feet I need to be near the subject of how much freedom I had and estimated how much more or less power I needed if I moved toward or away from the subject.

[Niresangwa]

Originally Posted by ChrisAdval

I could have, I'm just very anti-grain even with noise reduction techniques they bother me. Anything higher than 800 ISO for shooting people is trash to me, unless the subject isn't a person shooting at 1200-3200 is ok, but anything higher is trash. During this shoot I preferred to use as much as I possibly could from the flash without using much ISO, 200 was the lowest I could get it without maxing out the power on the flash for each shot.

As for shooting in auto, i.e. shutter priority, maybe, but then it will auto ISO for me to 6400 every time.... unusable for me. And, it would auto put the aperture to 1.8 (lowest on the lens), that was too soft for shooting a person especially for environmental portraits. I was trying to get the highest level aperture as much as possible without maxing out the power on my flash plus having the ISO to the lowest levels possible at the same time. Manual was my only option, and I would never use aperture priority in a low light setting here as it would auto shoot it at 10-30 seconds or whatever like that and completely crap the shot as I was hand holding the camera. But Thanks for the critique I'll play with shutter priority and see if the camera knows not to use 6400 ISO.

And metering, was trail and error of doing a test shot of the new scene I was in with the strob as I was moving around a lot it was somewhat pointless to use a light meter and couldn't use the in-camera meter if I was using a strob. So I picked a level of power of flash output and estimated the amount of feet I need to be near the subject of how much freedom I had and estimated how much more or less power I needed if I moved toward or away from the subject.

So higher ISOs bother you to the extent that you're happier with a woefully under exposed and unbalanced image? Maybe you ought to step back and ask why you're so stubborn about that.

Rhetorical question, of course, you seem to have it all figured out anyway.