10-01-2014 10:50 PM - edited 10-02-2014 01:24 PM
After 30 years of actively shooting I've decided to take the plunge and put together a portfolio by shooting friends and their families. I'm doing most of these for free to quickly put a portfolio together. I'll be shooting Maternity, Children and Family portraits to get my feet wet and I feel really good about finally doing this. I would appreciate any and all advice regarding the trade in general, suggestions on any particular equipment I should use and techniques that help workflow and final production presentation. I thank you in advance for your generosity in taking some time out of your day to help me move forward. My first shoot is a maternity this Saturday!
10-02-2014 01:42 PM
Got it. Well, you certainly have everything you need to make a good portrait. There are plenty of photographers that can do wonders with a 60D, that 50mm 1.2, and some good natural light. I can’t comment on whether or not you have that skill. I’m making a generalization, but I’d say that natural light portrait photographers use less post processing than those that use lighting. And those that do use post processing seem to focus more on colors, tones, and third party filters to give old film looks and whatnot (e.g. the VSCO filters). Again, this is just a generalization.
Off-camera lighting is a different beast entirely. Most glamour, beauty, studio portrait, boudoir, etc. uses lighting. And most of these styles traditionally have a lot of retouch. Again, a generalization. This is the stuff I prefer, so my comments lean towards this style. A natural light portrait photographer might weigh in and disagree with everything I say. Off-camera lighting takes a bit of practice to get the hang of, but just getting the basics down and getting a well exposed studio portrait isn’t all that difficult. That decent shot can become a good portrait if you know what you’re doing in post. I’m not advocating not learning off-camera lighting well, just that many portraits are nothing more than a well exposed shot in-camera. Great portraiture, on the other hand, takes great lighting, models, vision, and post processing, but that’s above the level of this discussion.
If you want to get into portrait retouching I recommend you learn the art of frequency separation and dodge and burn, if you haven’t already. Those are a high end retouchers tools (and a tablet, gotta have a tablet). Many photographers gravitate towards third party plugins like Imagenomic’s Portraiture or the Topaz Labs stuff. It’s ok, but they look like an automated filter, IMHO. If you do use them, use them lightly. There’s plenty of stuff on the web on frequency separation. D&B can be more difficult to find a good tutorial. There’s lots of macro stuff, which is pretty much just shading. Good portraiture retouchers use D&B on the pixel level. The results, when done well, are far better than any automated process will get you. But it takes practice, and even then, it takes a lot of time in post on just a single image.
If you want to get into lighting I can recommend a setup. If that’s not your cup of tea, then I’d say you have everything you need. The 50mm and the 85 should suffice for most uses. For outdoor I like to use a 135+ focal length, but it’s not necessary. You can use your 430ex, on camera, in TTL for a simple fill flash, if properly modified.
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