The smirk says it all.
Took this show in a hotel room in downtown Toronto with a British travelling model while doing a lingerie/nude photo shoot.
I brought the red hat and she provided the rest, she enjoyed the shoot a lot and was a great model.
I think this type of laying down portrait is difficult to get "Right" or good enough and having some kind of prop obviously helps but the setting and the model are important as well, the blue city background contrasts well with the red hat and rosy skin.
As usual the scene is lit with a single speedlight, which bounces off the white hotel room walls.
This was shot with the Canon 5d mk2 and the 24-105 f4 IS lens which was may go to portrait lens for many years.
What do you think of this unique horizontal portrait?
p.s. they are natural and they were spectacular!
The posing is very unflattering (Arm look weird and the fingers on the hat). And the lighting make the image very flat.
The prop has nothing to do with the setting, so why use it? It's a cowboy hat... in a hotel room... in a city. There's no connection whatsoever.
As far as the "laying down portrait" goes; it's not that difficult to do if you're actually considering angles, composition and focal length... none of which seems to have been considered here.
The lighting is atrocious, with the whites being way overblown and glaring. You didn't even get the focus right. This is not a portrait, it's a snapshot of a nude model that any person who knows how to press the shutter release could get.
Look at it objectively and give yourself an honest critique after comparing this to some of the highly rated images on this site. If you don't, then you're just going to keep repeating the same mistakes and convincing yourself you've shot some "great images," when in reality you've only created eye candy for lonely men.