Informal portraits

In this set, I think my most successful portrait is #4. I love the quiet scenes between the girl and the dog, and I think pairing these two together made both of them look good. I also like how the dog is in focus in the first photo, and in the second the person is more in focus. To emphasize the muted tone and to make the photos more coherent, I desaturated them both a little.

For these informal portraits, I only cropped them and changed the colors a little. I like how simple they are, with not much going on besides the subjects. In 1, 2, and 5, cropping helped balance the composition. I especially like how the focus in 2 is on the end of the guitar, not the subject’s face; this is a less traditional way to do a portrait, and I was trying to make some photos more unique. In 5, I adjusted the tones to make it warmer, trying to add to the emotion.

Feedback from small groups was helpful because I got new ideas about how to crop in different ways and put multiple images together. It was another person’s suggestion to put photos together, and that’s how I got the idea to make #4. Also, it was suggested that I burn the dog in 5 to make it less washed out. That didn’t work as well as I wanted because there weren’t many midtones to be brought out to begin with, and simply darkening the whole dog looked fake.