Welcome to Gaia! ::

so far I have been asked to do two family portraits, and I want them to look nice because one is for my best friend's family, and the other is for my boyfriend's family and their exchange student/ sister from Japan who is visiting soon.


I was wondering if anyone had any tips they could give me before I do these portraits?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here are the results of the shoot... at least some of the ones that the family wanted.

[x]-I liked this one, I tried to get a nice short DOF, but the girls in the back ended up getting a little blurred. . .
[x]-This was my favorite, also the one that they decided they wanted prints of. This is the photo before I edited it tho, because the edited one is on a different computer.
[x]-This is from the same day, and they ended up liking this to, even tho it wasn't actually from the shoot.



Critiques and advice for next time would be nice!
blaugh

lol, Ill try! Thank you for the advice! the job is Saturday, so wish me luck!

You don't need a tripod, it's nice but you don't need one unless it gets dark out. If you're shooting and it's bright and sunny out and you're shooting at 500th of a second, 1000th, etc.. You won't need one.


Oh here's a quick tip..

Set it to autofocus, zoom in, focus on their eyes, switch it back to manual focus, zoom out and recompose and take the shot. That way their eyes are nice and sharp and you don't have to worry about the focus changing or maybe getting their hair in focus, etc.

If you're shooting at 5.6 or f8 you won't need to worry too much if someone moves back and forth a little (Or if you do).. If you're shooting at larger apertures then it can be a foreseeable problem but you should be fine for the most part.

I also have some real good tips on shooting hand held but maybe I'll save those for later wink

I ended up having them sitting on a playground! lol
the only down side is that they chose a park with no real nice places for a picture...

Well, they must have liked what I did, because they asked me to come back and shoot their son's Eagle scout court of honor for them! blaugh

aww, thanks! The second to last is my favorite, and the last one is my boyfriend. Aren't I lucky!? heart blaugh heart