portraiture and context advice please

sineadw

I have no idea why I'm not asleep by now, forgive the obvious lack of functioning brain cells..

Just back from the holliers, I was down in Kerry for a week or so, got some great stuff its gonna take me an age to get through. I got this one and it has me a little torn..



Maybe its just the flickr resize thing? It works much better as a larger image I think, but I'm looking for input on if you think it works at all. What I see is an image that doesn't know whether its a bad landscape with a person in it or a bad portrait with a bit of a backdrop. I've tried different crops and different processes on it though and its just not coming to me. It was taken completely on the fly so I know the lighting's not great - his face is too dark and it was a shockingly bright day so maybe that's what the problem is? I was trying to get a little of who he is. He'd just practically danced down Mount Brandon (for those who don't know, bloody high and steep!) with a hundred or so sheep and two working dogs, and when I surreptitiously snapped this he was asking the woman I was with if we knew where he might find a half decent looking wife. Mental.. Maybe its just a crap shot and I like it because I was there and I have an emotional attachment to the scene? For some reason I do like it though. C&C would be most appreciated..

I guess I'm doing my usual "how do you take a good photograph" thing again (sorry), but any tips on marrying the subject with the context would be nice as this image has been infuriating me for a few days now. This type of shot is completely new to me, so I mean that in a general question sense as well as to the shot above.

ThOnda

Looks funny, but there's something what could be better.
Fill-in flash (the pop-up one on your camera) would definitely help. I think.
And it was too birght, so the colours are gone. Maybe if you can play a little with curves and saturation... who knows.
By thw way, did you give him an answer to his question? :-D

nilhg

Sinead, to me it looks as if you have blown out the sky and sheep's backs, I would try reducing the exposure and using some fill light to bring back up his face, your mileage will vary on this depending on whether the original is RAW or jpeg.
I would also have a look at the white balance it looks a little cool to my eye.

Roen

Not much you can do about the mountain slicing his head in two though

elven

I think there's definitely something in there worth pulling out.

The imbalance in the composition, I think, is the land that he has his back to. Presuming you didn't already crop off any to the right, you may have to go square to balance it up and put him on the left of the frame.

I think you're likely to be able to pull a lot more detail from him with a sneaky combination of the shadows/highlights tool and a mask, and also to bring down the brightness of the sky and the sheeps. Even if you've blown out some of the sky completely we could probably bring back at least a bit of detail to make it not just pure white.

It might be worth a tiny bit of blur on the line of the mountains behind him just to soften it and lessen the slicing effect - although I didn't notice that right off the bat anyway.

I think the expression is just priceless so it's worth putting some work in to bring it to its best. I also like the fact that you see the landscape in the background, and the sheeps in front of him - my favourite kind of portrait is one that shows a bit of the subject's environment to tell you something about them, and I think this one really does.

I'd love to get my hands on the raw file of this...

sineadw

I tried pulling up some of the colour but it didn't go very well. I think the camera metered for the sky alright (I'm gonna have to learn more about that stuff...) as it was a piercing blue on the day. The histogram isn't cutting on the high end though so I don't think I completely blew anything. I pulled up the shadows a lot, cleaned the colours up then applied a mask and tried to bring just the sky and the sheep back down. The original is a hell of a lot flatter, but I'm still very very far from happy with this one. Julie I have the RAW if you want a go??? Not sure if its worth the effort, maybe this should go in the holiday snaps folder I just wasn't quick enough mentally to frame and set it up better while he wasn't looking.

Any general advice on this type of portraiture? Good resources?

mikeanywhere

Hi Sinead,

I had a play with the image using levels and the smallest of a curve adjustment in the first instance and managed to recover a fair bit of the detail in the guy. Give that a go