Untitled

Alternative titles:

1) "Daddy, I mustache you a question."

2) "Chocolate Mousse-tache."

etc, etc

Just a bit of fun

I'm laughing :) Our daughter use to "play" with her food. I've had many a discussion with her about this practice. It didn't change a thing :) She's 29 & she still gets most of it on herself :) We use to call her "Pigpen" after the Peanuts character. Things just seemed to jump off her where ever she went :)

I love the image, love the expression & the hair lights are perfect. Nicely lit & super DOF. What a face :)

Fun shot for sure though the expression on her face is saying something much more like "Daddy why did you put this muck on me and make me sit here while you take a picture?"

Nice bit of fun, thanks for sharing

Iain

She would certainly let me if I wanted to as she would have considered it a giggle.

I can claim that this wasn't the case though.

BTW, I enjoyed (and agreed with) your helpful comment about framing, presentation, etc for IM Jorcano's portfolio.

I would also welcome your advice. Have a glimpse through my portfolio (minus my Just for fun folder) and let me know what you think should you get the opportunity .

Thanks.

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your comments and I took a look over your portfolio and on the whole it is pretty darn good, in fact good enough to match a lot of commercial portrait photographers that I have seen. Maybe it is time to take the next big step with your photography and work with paying clients rather than just with your family and friends. The reason I say this is no critique given on any web site matches the satisfying feeling within when someone actually respects and loves your work enough to pay for it.

Your landscape photography in my eyes is excellent to I can?t offer any suggestions for improvement on that side of your work as it is probably better than mine already. I would suggest if you really like landscape work that you search out some art sourcing agencies and present your portfolio to them, there are always hotels, office block and public amenities that are being redesigned and go to art agencies for wall hangings and the like, yours could be just what they are looking for.

With regards to any suggestions that might help you there are only two really and they do not relate to the lighting or the framing of your work they are mainly related to the post production and presentation side.

Cropping:

You don't seem to have a uniformed cropping ratio such as an 8 X 10 or 10 X 12 etc, for me this indicates that you are not working in prints as much as digital displays (though I could be wrong) If you decide to start promoting yourself to the public for portraiture it is best that you work in recognised sizes, there are a couple of reasons for this the first being it saves a lot of time slicing prints down to size when they come back from the lab and secondly it is far cheaper to get frames for regular sized prints than it is custom sizes. An example of this is I recently did a family portrait for a family and they wanted it to fit perfectly within a 35 inch gap on their wall (between two wall lights) and yes they where very fussy, when I priced it the cost of the custom frame would have been doubly what the price of a 36 inch frame was simply down to it would have had to be custom built, the same is true but in a lesser degree to an 8 X 10 as opposed to an 8 X 10.5

Contrast:

On some of your Black & White's your contrast looks a little dull and foggy, this could well just be down to your screen settings, get a nice shot printed by a professional lab and hold it up to the printed file on the screen, if they don?t match then try to set your monitor up so they are as close as you can get them. Contrast is what makes highlights and shadows define the depth within the image, a little bump on the contrast can do as much for an image as 20 minutes work with a sharpening brush around the eyes.

To summarize,

You have an excellent portfolio it is very strong and very endearing a great mix of expressions, looks and moods, I really think it is time for you to take that big jump outside of your comfort zone and look beyond your own family.

Good luck and well done, you have a great eye for what makes a great portrait, all the best.

Iain

Thanks Iain,

You are quite correct.

I have never printed out any of my shots and purely work in the digital domain and as a consequence have never put any thought into sizes.

I have also recently seen my shots on another monitor which perhaps is set up correctly. This showed me the lack of contrast that you spoke of.

I'm flattered by your opinion and feel pleased that your comments centre around elements that I can put right almost straight away.

I shall ensure that I get my monitor calibrated against a print and look into producing standardised sized shots.

I have been asked to take shots for a number of families but wanted to ensure that I charge the appropriate amount.

I would say that I would rope my Mother into producing all mounts (which she would do individually) to suit any crop. These would then be framed by her and the service I would provide would centre around high quality framed shots.

This is not cast in stone and so i should think about copies, etc. Best, as you so rightly say, in a standard format.

I'm afraid I don't have a clue about charging and wouldn't know how to charge for the extra (Digital darkroom) work that accompanies most (if not all) of my shots.

Perhaps I wouldn't charge for that at all.

Your help was really appreciated and turned out to be incredibly insightful making this the most useful critique I have recieved.

Thanks for you time. You've given me something to think about.

That next step is being considered.

Thanks again,

kind regards,

Paul

Hi Paul,

You are more than welcome and thanks for asking me to take a look, I am not sure if it is just me or the way I look at things but so many times when I do critique a photograph it seems to be the kiss of death for anyone else to critique it afterwards, maybe it is because I say all there is to say about an image but I seriously doubt that, it is more likely that generally people just critique based on if they like the image or not and what help are comments like ?great photo? or ?nice shot? to people except for boosting egos or boosting the feel good factor.

Critiques for me are to commend the good aspects and highlight the controversial ones, though these days with changing attitudes and styles critiques have changed a lot from commenting on the thirds rules and the shadow rules, believe it or not at one time if you took a traditional portrait and the shadow was not close to 3 stops difference at the darkest part to the lightest you got told your lighting was wrong. How things have changed and for the better.

With regards to what you should be charging, you need to look around at other local photographers and see what the average is, never try to be the cheapest as people automatically apply the thought process that quality is price related and very cheap means just that. Undercut the competition by all means but do it realistically if they are making a living selling at their prices that is what the customers in the area are willing to pay for that product.

What I do is work to another thirds rule for pricing, if the cost of producing a framed 8 X 10 is say $20 then I times that by 3 for the starting price, that makes the costs, the tax man and the profit all set at the minimum of cost price. Then I may increase that by another third to $80 total price, then I have flexibility to offer discounts without losing. Once you have a set price list for standard sizes you are in a much better place to work out pricing up custom sizes and orders.

This is where a more uniformed approach is useful as the more custom work you do the more time it takes and it is hard to claw back hours worth of work on a single print so you need to be able to run with a set of uniformed steps for editing standard photographs. In photoshop you can save things like B&W conversions in the actions and run whole folders of images through it to save time and convert them all in one go and then go back and tend to things like cropping and levels and contrasts on an individual basis.

Have fun and I look forward to seeing lots of great new photographs from you.

All the best

Iain