Portrait Features: Debbie (Lady Stiletto in a Suits) and Flory

We had been planning it for weeks for this portrait session. I suggested taking her portrait after looking at her Bali vacation photo. Debbie look so relax and natural in front camera because i guess she was taken by many professional photographer previously and indeed she did. Nevertheless, the rains put the plan on hold for weeks until i spot a clear evening day to shoot. First at all i really worried that she will not get used to me as a stranger taking her photo and then she brought her friend Flory. Flory is happen to be her childhood friend and at that moment i think there will not be any problem.



This is Flory, Debbie's good friend. She have a very good face feature for commercial shot but because of her lack of confident, the photo taken quite lack of emotion. Not so deep eyes, high cheek bones and nose and a good smile. It is quite hard to take her photo because the wind blowing her hair covering the face. I managed to take only some lucky shot of her.




This is one of her lucky shot. I shot the photo with flash face close to her face. Some over burn highlight after photo shop on the face even thou the picture look underexpose. Again, this photo was intensely photo shop to match the shadow and highlight and color correct at the face and manipulation effect at the back.




She looks gorgeous on this shot. The depth of field that focused on her and Debbie* blurred at the back make the combination look nice. Again, the eye contact looks perfect. (*Edited)



This is an act setting. It looks like a natural pose but actually not. I like the emotional outburst of laughter and give a happy moment feel that often seen in wedding photos.



At this time, i believe that she look more confidence over herself. Some of people look so anxious over big camera and cannot give a very best expression towards it. She still have some problem looking direct to the lens thou. If you aware of it, most of the photo of her holding her hair from the strong wind at the time.



Again, she is holding her hair.



A nice and natural position pose. There are some photos of her that i didn't really photo shop because most of the frame was over or underexpose. I will find more time to look at it one by one.



The photo above was taken with a flash sync setting. I don't know if it can consider it a flash sync photo but it does look like one. This setting although my shot not really a perfect one the most used in studio photo shot for commercial and weddings. I use a infrared remote flash setting to shot this photo and it turn out not so good until i did some correction in photo shop. The truth is, too much correction on the photos are not good because it mean that one photographer shot skills not up to the standard yet.



A straight looks on the camera with 8 o'clock flash setting. The ambient blue background look nice thou it should be warm. This was caused by the fast shutter speed only being able to get little color spectrum and my color filter to even out the skin's white balance color tone.

Basically, I rate this set of photos as good and more room for improvement. This time I only concentrate using a single 50mm f1.8 lens for a portrait setting and a bit 70-300mm zoom lens. I like the depth of field effect when taking a portrait because it more focused on a targeted subject. I have one actual couple pre wedding shot test shot with my friend on December. I am still thinking the location for this session and would like to find a newer place beside going again to resort or hotels. Maybe can be more casual or more people location setting. Well, we see how then.