Portraits

From Portraits

From Portraits

Click here to see all my photos for this assignment.

I had a little bit of trouble with this assignment, but I think in the end I learned a lot from it.  I'm torn on portraits because of all the pictures I stumble across on the internet I'm drawn most to pictures of people, but I'm the kind of person who can't put her subject at ease very well.  I guess I'll just have to practice!

I planned to take pictures of my parents, but I started out practicing on myself and Brian.  I have a tripod and a remote, so I set everything up and took some pictures of us on the stairs in our house.  I mention all of this (and included the pictures) only because I learned something VERY useful about my camera's white balance that  night.  In our living room where we had set up, we have a very strange mixture of incandescent light and also really yellow light from those energy-saver bulbs.  So the first few photos of us were really yellow and green.

From Portraits

I tried to adjust the colors by using my white balance.  I even went in and skewed the Incandescent preset to try to get rid of the yellow/green tones, but it wasn't working very well.  When I first got my camera, I had played around with the "Preset Manual" white balance setting and thought this might be a good time to try it.  So, we took a picture of a very yellow-looking pillow to use as the reference, and voila!

From Portraits

Perfect white balance!  I must keep that in mind in the future.

One of the other big lessons that I learned through this process is that I have a hard time taking portraits in low light if the camera is handheld.  At the end of the process, I was trying to get some more candid photos, but everyone moved so fast!  Even with my ISO set to 800 or 1600, the shutter speed was usually too slow to catch those fleeting facial expressions.  My mom was expecially difficult to capture on film.

I also decided that I'm not the biggest fan of my camera's Cloudy and Shady white balance presets.  I think that they take out too much blue and leave the image too red.