I am very excited that a portrait I recently took of my niece is being critiqued by Scott Bourne in the ScottCritiques group on flickr.

As an avid photographer, it is always good to have someone who is impartial look at your work and offer advice on how to make it better.  For the most part my work is seen by friends and family and the overwhelming response is “Fantastic” or “Those pictures are so good”.  While this may feel good, the reality is most of them don’t know what to look for or they are just being nice.

The portrait is part of a larger set I took of my nice for her 16th birthday.  As it turns out she was a very cooperative subject.  We had a great time roaming around the JC Raulston Arboretum finding interesting places that would make a good background for a portrait.

The image to the right is one of my favorites and was taken in the Japanese Garden.  One of the keys to a great outdoor portrait is a very simple background and good lighting. In this case the background was a beautiful  red Japanese maple, which given its color and busy leaves could have been too detailed.  However, to bring the background down and the subject out I chose a very wide aperture of f2.8.  The wide aperture has the effect of blurring the background in any photograph with a very shallow depth of field.  The means that if your focus is on your subject object that are immediately in front or behind them will be out of focus and this will help draw the viewers eyes to the primary subject of the image.

Secondly, I used an inexpensive reflector to direct some light onto my subject.  In this case my brother was standing to my left, subject right, at about a 45 degree angle.  As you can see in the image there is some sunlight coming in from the top right, providing a little rim light on her shoulder and hair.  Using the reflector we were able to take some of that light and direct it back into the front of our subject to give some dimension to her face and provide fill for the shadows thrown by the trees over head.

So far there have been a couple of posts with some very interesting options about what the photographer might change.  I am looking forward to seeing what Scott says at the end of the week and using any advice I get to further improve my work.