Learning the Art of the Portrait

For some time now I've been trying to find someone who doesn't mind having their picture taken - a harder challenge than you might think. It's the next logical step for me as I move along the road of photographic discovery. Not that I don't still enjoy landscape/nature photography, but I'm finally feeling competent enough with the fundamentals to move onwards to live human subjects.

This is Devon, the daughter of a friend. She agreed, quite readily apparently, to be the guinea pig for my further search for understanding of light, focus and shutter speed. Little did she know...

Actually, we got quite lucky today. Half an hour earlier the sun was behind some clouds and the light was horribly contrasty and white. Then it came out from behind with some wonderful soft fall colour, and we found the perfect spot with light filtering through some trees. This is probably the only shot I'll post from today, but there were a number of very good ones (in my estimation) at this same location. I'll go down in my books as a top spot, that's for sure - at least until all the leaves fall off the trees. And we won't talk about the fact that I messed up most of the later shots by making the rookie move of not paying attention to my settings... too much time spent lately taking pictures of birds on one of the more automatic camera settings. D'oh!

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