First Portraits Taken

I've never REALLY had an interest in taking true portraits of people, but over the past couple of months I've become more intrigued by the idea. Problem is, there's SO much to learn, and it's much different than still, nature, landscape, flowers, leaves, etc.

It's the skin... I tend to over saturate, contrast and/or sharpen. Which, from reading, is common from those who art just starting.

Anyway... a customer of mine (actually, more of a friend now than a customer) talked me into taking pictures of her two kids (son is going to be a senior at IWU this fall and daughter is going to be a freshman at Augustana this fall). It took a lot of self-encouragement to do it, but last Wednesday I spent a coupe of hours taking pictures at two locations of them. It was a lot of fun, and luckily my nervousness didn't show too much.

I've gone through all the pictures and thrown out the REALLY bad ones. I'm getting ready to post the remaining ones for my friend to look at, then I'll start touching them up. Here are two that I already did a little work with just to see how they're going to turn out:


Again, I'm just learning on the whole Photoshop thing and these are just "drafts"... "her" picture has WAY too much red in it (tried to make her red hair "pop" more and didn't have time to separate it out as another layer, so it had a strong effect on her skin, too).

SOOOOOOOOOOOOO much to learn. Where do I start? I'm looking forward to seeing how they turn out... After I've pulled all of my hair out getting them there!!!

(My blog posts also get posted to Facebook... I wonder how long it will take them to see their pictures on there :))