lessons learned

so the other day (as in, a few weeks ago, ish) i helped a friend of mine by shooting a few for her fashion portfolio  for design school, which was pretty fun. and there were ice cream sandwiches involved, so (y)(y) for that. anyways, it was my first time shooting fashion-type stuff (not including mr. wong's sort-of-fashion-assignment-but-not-really), so it was a pretty interesting learning experience, and i definitely took a few lessons from it:

composition and depth of field: be acutely aware of it.

you'd think that composition would be pretty obvious, but apparently not as (photographically speaking) shown in these pictures - in both, the depth of field is too much, and the background gets too distracting - since there's plenty of room to get closer without cutting off body parts, now i know to do that next time so as to blur out the background more.and for some inexplicable reason, the above shot is at f6.3, resulting in a clear background that will inevitable distract the viewer's eyes from the model - a noob mistake. also, another note to self from these is two watch what's in my frame and what's not - bit of a dumb move to cut off the ankles in the bottom picture there.

there's a time and a place for fill flash.

and the above is a good example of one. it works out pretty well for this shot, but looking at the info, it says this was taken at f4; shooting at f2.8 would've been better as far as the background goes, and it would give the flash a bit of a boost - if it's too much, maybe just a half-stop at f3.2 or something. that, and point the camera a little lower so the overexposed bits at the top are cut out and you get more of the area around the feet. also, a polarizer would've been useful here to get rid of reflections in the water, but i don't own one so, meh.

and in the bottom here is a good example of when fill flash isn't really needed - in the future, turn the model towards the sun maybe. or, even better, bring some sheets of cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil and prop it up against a tripod. that, and the composition stuff again - there's plenty of room to move closer to the model to make it more frame-filling. and if i get an external flash in the future, that could also be helpful - use it wirelessly and position it just out of frame (i'm thinking below and to the left) to fill in shadows, since external flashes allow pretty good control of exposure, letting you go as low as 1/256 of its full power.

get it in focus.

in the spur of the moment, i'm just constantly shooting while the model constantly poses and re-poses. so i guess it can be understandable if i miss the focus now and then. that said, there were too many out of focus bloopers from this shoot for my liking, so lesson learned:

check the focus.

check the focus.

check the focus.

check the goddamn focus.

despite the mistakes made (it was a learning experience, after all!), it was still plenty fun, and a good amount of keepers came out of it in the end: