Hi, I've been shooting for about a year now and trying to learn the craft every day. I want to get some critique and honest feedback on what I'm doing right and what needs to be improved. My passion is portraiture, to make an every day girl/woman feel like a supermodel and bring out her inner beauty. All the subjects in my port are real people, not models and first shoot for all of them.
Thank you in advance,
Ania

I think most of the folks you've photographed would be well pleased with the inner beauty you've brought out in your work.

From a technical standpoint, several of the images, e.g. the second and third in the first row and second and third in the second row seem to suffer from flare or fogging of some sort. Were they taken with film or digitally? If the latter you could improve them a bit in post by increasing the contrast. (You could do that even if they were shot on film by scanning them and working on the scanned digital image.)

Keep up the good work.

Thank you for the feedback. They were shot digitally and processed to give more of a vintage look with less contrast. I like that style but might need to play with it more so it doesn't make the image washed out.

I think you're off to a ok start. Don't take it the wrong way, Rome wasn't built in a day.

From your port, I feel like your strongest stuff is when you're not actively trying to present people in a certain. Like this one:

A. <-- its a beautifully, honest captured moment

I also like this one...

B.

...for different reasons. You had an idea & went w/ it full-throttle (or at least it LOOKS like you had an idea).

When you try & half-ass something either not quite going after a specific idea or not quite letting the moment happen, it glaringly shows.

My suggestions:

1. Keep at it. Practice makes perfect. & practice A LOT, so much so that at some point you could do portrait work in your sleep.

2. Do some homework. Spend some time looking at people who do actor headshots & how (if they're good), they're able to get the actors to connect w/ nothing but the X-factor in their eyes.

3. Do more homework. I highly encourage you to look at the past photographic masters like Arbus Bourke-White, Weston, Steigleitz, Avedon, & Eisenstaedt (to name a few) & see how each of them connected w/ their subjects & how they differed.

I'd also encourage you to look at classical painters like Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Raphael, Jacque-Louis David to name a few. Pay particular attention to how they composed their works as well as observing their sense of light.

In my opinion...

The best:

The two picked by the poster above. Both pictures are very good. I like the kiss picture. The face covered with hair is a contrast of a tender moment with the slightly unnerving look of a face covered with hair.

The woman wearing a hat and a veil and the woman on the blanket are OK.

The suck:
The first picture: the background is a freaking mess. The process photography is a process of eliminating unwanted elements from the image. The light is flat, the styling of the clothes poor.

The last picture in the first row: I have no idea what you were trying to do there.

Several pictures have flattened tonal range and muted colors. I like the colors but flat tonal range doesn't do much for me, it makes the images look washed out and not in a good way. Try going full shadows and blacks and clip the high end of the tonal range.

Thank you very much for the feedback.

You may like the style you are creating, but it just looks washed out
[The black dress just has lost its snap, looks like too much lens glare]
Composition, too much grass at the bottom

Loose the photo borders


What is the subject? Photo too busy
Make the background less distracting by blurring it