B/W Portrait for critique

Ijustwant1

Ijustwant1

Senior Member
Hi I would like to improve my black and white skills , this is a photo of my daughter shot outside,
F/8
1/15
ISO 100
32mm kit lens 18-55mm vr .
BWMel2.jpg shot in RAW then with colour channel mixer in photoshop
 
D

Don Kuykendall_RIP

RIP :(
First off there is to much head room and the head off to one side like that bothers me. Also the pieces of arm coming and going from the shot is a bit disconcerting.
The shot would work much better if it were a little wider to show the arms of move them out of the shot altogether.
 
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Moab Man

Senior Member
Repeating what Don said. The black and white aspect of it looks really good. The framing of your model in the picture needs work. A little bit more lighting of her face.

I also wonder if a softening of the model, in Photoshop a Gaussian Blur, might improve the photo as the image is sharp - lol which is so many times what we are striving for.

Did a little cropping down to put her eyes in a more pleasing position IMO and got rid of all that dead space. As for the chopping of arms... I couldn't do anything with that. I also applied a slight softening (Gaussian Blur) to the photo and lightened it a bit for the face but the brightness to the side is quite a bit brighter.

BWMel2.jpg
 
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Mfrankfort

Senior Member
Nice picture... but agree with above. The first thing my eye was drawn to was the space above her head. The "Dead space". Try to keep the space around that doesn't have much to a minimum, and remember not to cut out any body parts, it looks a bit odd with half an arm cut off. :) Keep it up!!
 
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unkyjohn

Senior Member
Increasing the distance between the model and the background, and opening the aperture will make the background blur thus emphasizing the model
 
hark

hark

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
Contributor
I agree with what's been said and will just add that I would have preferred to see the shot taken at the 55mm end rather than at 32mm. Even though you are on a DX camera, 32mm really isn't like using a 48-50mm on an FX body. Take a look at her arms. Her elbow area is closest to the camera, and because it's taken at 32mm, her arms are slightly exaggerated more than they would have been if taken at 55mm. That's what wide angle lenses do--they exaggerate what is closest to the lens and push back what is further from the lens. It's still a nice photo though. :)
 
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