This self-portrait shoot was at Evelyn Hallman Park- a beautiful location in Tempe, AZ. Evelyn Hallman is not on any of the lists I’ve seen for premier locations, but I was pleased with the variety of backgrounds. I also liked the fact that there were less people here. I definitely get stares when I go to more public places and people see me taking photos with the Tri-pod. 🙂
Anyway, this was one of my first official shoots where I thought a lot more about my poses, lighting and the camera lens I used. Below I have the settings for the majority of images I took on this day. I have two Canon cameras; I have used Canon since the beginning of my photography so I won’t ever switch.
In general, I am not just going to post my best images and the ones that I edited. I want to add learning opportunities whenever possible- and I want to improve my skills. For this reason, I am going to include photos to my blogs (and this one) that demonstrates what I could do better.
I generally take all of my images in RAW- (gives you more editing controls). I forgot to set my camera to the RAW mode at the start of this, so there are one or two that I wont’ be able to give the shooting details.
This one is okay- I think my skin tone looks natural. I was able to edit the background in Photoshop to make it pop more. I look kind of uncomfortable though and my neck looks strained. For this shot- it would have looked better if I relaxed more and dropped my chin a little. After looking at my settings – a shutter speed of 1/30, I was surprised that my eyes looked as sharp as they did. Still a little blurry..
My skin is a cooler tone in this one. I prefer the one above better. My friend loaned me some jewelry to take photos with- not sure it works with the outfit and environment. I’m not usually a big chain kind of gal anyway. Haha. You can see at f 2/8, the background will blur. The further away the background is, the more blur you will have. I am also learning about eye placement and how the eye looks in the image. I have too much of the white of my eye showing. This shot would look better if I looked back at the camera.
I don’t own horses or live on a ranch- but I’m going to take photos with my cowgirl hat anyway by golly. Overall, I was happy with this shot. I like my head placement and the angle of my arm holding the brim of the hat. The background is the same color as my hat- so it doesn’t pop the way I would like. I tried to “color” in the background to be green. With my current editing skills in Photoshop, it looked cheesy so I just left it.
I only took a couple of full body shots. All sorts of stuff is wrong with this one. It’s blown out, my eyes are closed, my stance looks awkward, and the trees in the background are very distracting. I needed to move over the right – and adjust focal length and tripod so the background looked better. At some point, I will be heading back over to this park to redo some of these.
I call this one- Deer in the Headlights.{Chuckle} I like the overall composition- but I clearly had expressionless eyes in this one. I didn’t realize how low my shutter speed was either. My face is a bit blurry due to the low shutter. As the sun sets, typically you should increase your ISO. This will automatically increase your shutter speed. Remember- the smaller your F stop number, the more light you allow in. So if I increased my F stop to F5/6 or higher, this lets LESS light in.
This was taken during golden hour and so I put my face directly in the sun. I did not edit this photo at all- the best part about taking photos in the sunset light is that it fills in a lot of wrinkles naturally! You can still see lines on my neck however- which I do edit these out sometimes using the Patch tool in photoshop. This is one of my go to Tools for editing crinkles and wrinkles quickly and naturally!
I hope you enjoyed this post- and learned a few things along the way. Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome! Please feel free to leave your thoughts below.
Thanks- and have….and Amazing Day!!
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