Portrait Photoshoot with a Friend Part 1/4

I had to shoot portraits for my photography class. I asked my friend to be my model. She was modeling for a first time and I had had like two years pause without doing any actual portraits. Of course I’d been taken snapshots of friends, selfies, etc. but not “real portraits”

I was planning the shoot and looking inspirations from class and Googling portraits. Googling wasn’t very helpful. The most useful thing was walking around campus and other areas nearby and try to find an inspiration. My model actually had also found couple good scenes so we made this together what comes to ideas. 🙂

We took about 600 pics with different themes so I choose 15 best ones to publish here and I separated them into four posts that will we published today (1^st), February 25^th 2015 (2^nd) and March 3^rd (3^rd), I’ll more over publish a post about my basic secrets to a good portrait. That will be published 6^th of March and you will see the of my 15 photos. 🙂 I scheduled these posts for three reasons: a) I don’t want to make one super long post, b) I have a lot of things to post so I wanted to separate these into three weeks so you have different kind of interesting things to read and c) I will be separated of internet for the first week of March but I don’t want this blog to be silent for a week.

Here you go guys: The first set of photos:

55mm, f/5.6, 1/1250, ISO800

This one is definitely one of my favorites! It’s shot outdoors nearby our campus. I have made the shadows a lot lighter and smoother with photoshop and it works very well in my opinion. Only thing I might have changed is ISO, I think something between 100-400 would have been enough (I guess I just forgot it to 800 after indoor shots).

30mm, f/4,5, 1/10, ISO3200

18mm, f/3,5, 1/1000, ISO200

We had good time (except her toes) and I think the photos well quite good especially compared to my portrait shooting skills and her modeling experience. Here you can see what happens when two amateurs are inspired and doing their best. 🙂 I’ll definitely shoot more portraits in future! These are a good beginning for a portfolio.

All the photos are shot with Canon EOS 550D + Canon EF-S 18-55mm f3.5-5-6 IS lens. I have done cropping and other editing with Photoshop CC.

It would be nice to get critique and feedback of my photos, compositions, lights, etc. So I would be more than happy of a comment, message or email! 🙂