In April 2017, ASU was throwing some kind of ball and my roommate thought it would be fun to get some pictures of her and her boyfriend before going. I thought it would be a great opportunity to practice photographing more than one person at a time. As it turned out, I ended up learning several very valuable lessons from this shoot:
1. Make sure to doublecheck and change the camera settings
I don't know why, but for some reason it didn't occur to me at all to check and change the ISO and aperture on my camera, which I probably had in aperture-priority mode. Because of this, every shot has an ISO of 800 despite being taken outside during golden hour, and my aperture was set to f/5.6 for the first half of the shoot, then f/4.5 for the second half. I know that I was going back and forth between the 18-55mm and the 75-200mm lenses, so I think that I was aiming to be as wide open as possible and then just hope for the best.
2. Doublecheck that my background is level
There are several shots where the background is tilted because I didn't take the time to make sure that my shot was properly composed. I cared so much about making sure that the background wasn't too bland that I didn't bother to make sure it was even.
3. Make sure that both people are in focus
There are a number of shots where one person is in focus, but not the other. I do believe that how I posed them played a big role, but I also need to learn how to better control the focus points on my camera.
4. Learn how to pose my subject(s) in general
After the photoshoot, I received feedback from my other roommates stating that the couple was posed awkwardly, so I should probably watch a tutorial or two on how to properly pose my subjects.
5. Think about where and how I'm going to pose my subject(s) before shooting
Part of this photoshoot was done on some train tracks that are split by a road. I had some ideas about how I wanted the couple to be lit, how I wanted them posed, and how I wanted the background to look, but I didn't like the idea of repeatedly moving from one side of the street to the other just so I could have the pictures that I wanted. What ended up happening was I just took a bunch of pictures from one side of the street, then we moved to the other side of the street, and all the while I was telling myself that I would just deal with how the light and the background looked on that side, I would just figure it out as I went along.
One solution would have been to just move back and forth across the street. It's not a busy road, I wasn't lugging around a lot of equipment, and it would have taken 10 steps max in each direction, so it definitely was a possibility. That all said, I realized afterwards that I need to be more thoughtful about how I'm going to compose my shot, so that I don't have to waste time going from one side of the street to the other.
Overall, I feel that a lot of the photos that came out of this shoot are okay, with a lot of room for improvement. Every photoshoot is a learning experience, and I definitely gained some important knowledge from this one.
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