First Pic Post - Portrait Advice

TommyC8923

TommyC8923

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Hi all,

Complete newcomer here and to photography in general. Anyway I fancy taking some head shots of my footy team for our pitchero account so been practicing on a mate today. This is my best shot I think - I'm struggling to get the shoulders crisp and in focus, any advice on what I should be changing in settings etc here appreciated - and any other tips / criticism welcomed!

View attachment 36799
 
Hi Can you post the EXIF Settings?

Looks like a shallow depth of field hence the shoulders aren't in focus. Depending on your lighting you'll want to increase the f stop to increrase what is in focus. f8 for example
 
Hi @^Joe - so I'm using a 5D Mk3 and was messing around with a couple of LED video camera lights as that's all I have - settings (Exposure: 1/100 / FNumber: 5 / Focal Length: 160 / (ISO): 2000 / Lens: EF75-300mm f/4-5.6 USM)

@Rich_Ellis - just a preference I guess. No real reason for it.
 
For that focal length, it's quite a wide apeture. You get around 4" of DOF. If you shot at say f11 you'd probably get double that... so you'd have to increase the lighting slightly as the ISO is already fairly high.
 
TommyC8923 said:
Hi all,

Complete newcomer here and to photography in general. Anyway I fancy taking some head shots of my footy team for our pitchero account so been practicing on a mate today. This is my best shot I think - I'm struggling to get the shoulders crisp and in focus, any advice on what I should be changing in settings etc here appreciated - and any other tips / criticism welcomed!
Click to expand...

You've caught a good expression and the eyes are nice and sharp. I don't think the shoulders really matter, but narrower aperture would fix it if you can provide more light. The shiny patches on the skin are a slight problem and the green really isn't a flattering colour.

One way to provide more light is to shoot outside.

If you want to shoot indoors then I'd suggest ignoring the video lights at first and using diffuse window light, e.g. a north facing window hung with muslin to the subject's left and a reflector (e.g. big piece of white card / polystyrene) to the subjects right. That would be a softer light than is often used for athletes but it should make for nice, evenly lit fairly foolproof portraits with some 3 dimensionality leaving you to concentrate on getting the framing & expression right.

You could augment the daylight by putting one or both video lights a couple of feet behind the muslin.

If you really want to play use this kind of lighting setup.. I'm surprised that you have to go to ISO 2000 but I haven't used video lights very often at all.

The background lighting is a bit bright. I think you might do better to put both video lights on the subject, one off to the side as you have, though maybe a little more central, and a fill light a bit more frontal, lower and slightly lower power to lift the shadows. And perhaps have a reflector as before. Then light the background separately with something else if you really want to. As it is one eye is much brighter than the other and that's a bit odd!
 
Hi @juggler thanks for that - I'll give using natural window light a go and see if I can get better results that way.
I had all other lights in the room off bar the LEDs so maybe explains the high ISO? And on the fill light, would you have that sort of waist height pointing slightly up - or head level?
 
TommyC8923 said:
Hi @juggler thanks for that - I'll give using natural window light a go and see if I can get better results that way.
I had all other lights in the room off bar the LEDs so maybe explains the high ISO? And on the fill light, would you have that sort of waist height pointing slightly up - or head level?
Click to expand...

Having the other lights off is a good idea, otherwise your white balance could be all over the place (an aside: I suspect auto WB has decided that the scene is so green that it's needed to compensate by making the image more magenta that reality, which may be why he's looking a bit pink).

For head & shoulders shots I'd start with the fill at head height, certainly not at waist height, unless I was going for a particular effect. You may want to move the fill up or down a little from there; look at the nose and neck shadows to help find a look you like.

One possibility has occurred to me - how far away were your lights? The inverse square law means that doubling the distance will reduce the amount of light to a quarter, i.e. 2 stops. A common starting point is to use a light source the same size as the subject, at about that distance from the subject, but that doesn't really help you when using video lights with no modifiers rather than flash. (btw, the small size of your light sources is partly what's causing the shiny patches).

Do give natural light a go, and show us the results!
 
juggler said:
Having the other lights off is a good idea, otherwise your white balance could be all over the place (an aside: I suspect auto WB has decided that the scene is so green that it's needed to compensate by making the image more magenta that reality, which may be why he's looking a bit pink).

For head & shoulders shots I'd start with the fill at head height, certainly not at waist height, unless I was going for a particular effect. You may want to move the fill up or down a little from there; look at the nose and neck shadows to help find a look you like.

One possibility has occurred to me - how far away were your lights? The inverse square law means that doubling the distance will reduce the amount of light to a quarter, i.e. 2 stops. A common starting point is to use a light source the same size as the subject, at about that distance from the subject, but that doesn't really help you when using video lights with no modifiers rather than flash. (btw, the small size of your light sources is partly what's causing the shiny patches).

Do give natural light a go, and show us the results!
Click to expand...

I had the lights set up so that the key light was about 3feet away and the second light a few feet directly left, lighting the background and trying to get a little spill onto the left hand side cheek. Inverse law = move lights a foot closer = greater light available and therefore can lower ISO etc??? The lights are about the size of 2 cds cases each for what it's worth
 
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