Hi guys, as I do once in a while, I decided to post another shot in the group, seeking for your thoughts. Thanks to everybody
Hi guys, as I do once in a while, I decided to post another shot in the group, seeking for your thoughts. Thanks to everybody
In many regards this is excellent. A beautiful woman, in nice clothes with lighting that is in many ways very good. There are just two things that I don't like. One is the inclusion of the dark tree trunks on the right. The other is the very bright "sunshine" on her hair and the sharp edge to the shaddow of the hat's brim. It is so bright and sharp it looks like off camera flash rather than the sun, which in the background looks less brilliant. If you did use ocf then using a smallish soft box would have provided a more natural edge to the shaddow and a stop or so less power would have looked more natural on a day when the sun appears not to be very bright. My point is that the subject looks to be in a slightly different situation to the background, which is a bit odd. Your frontal fill-in looks very well handled, very subtle with only the rather bright reflection in the left eye and the delicate shaddow below the right eye to give the game away. That is very well done. I would have very slightly lowered and moved my fill-in light to camera right, so the reflection in her eye would look more as if from the sky, as the natural light in the frame is coming from the right. This would also have made the general lighting of her face look even more natural, avoiding the soft shaddow below her right eye and not flattening the light on her arm/hand, too. I am being very analytical here because it is such a good job and very small adjustments would have made it even better. For most of us, such fine-tunings are less important because we have bigger problems to address.
Very complete feedback, thank you for pointing out the things I should be working on, it was all with natural light it is just that I found a window of light in the bushes and used it as key light with the reflector on the left to fill the shadows. Thanks again!!
Thanks for the additional info. Generally when the daylight comes from the back/right, as in this case, fill light should come from the same fron/right. This is counter intuitive I know, but we are used to nature having one light source so multiple shaddows in different directions and multiple reflections or reflections in eyes where the daylight is not seen to be coming from just don't sit well. Reflectors on the shade side need therefore to be very subtle and not to cause the eyes reflections effect mentioned. Of course, these are guidelines not laws and as such should be used or disregarded as required but if you don't know the guidelines you will sometimes make mistakes because you did not think about the guidance before doing something different.
Nice photo all the same.