Here's one of my recent works, all shot with natural light only, would like some comments on it, thanks everyone.
Fstoppers link:
A recent work, CC please
Here's one of my recent works, all shot with natural light only, would like some comments on it, thanks everyone.
Fstoppers link:
Very pretty girl, great use of colour, nice soft light. All good. Looking at her skin, it seems too perfects but is that because you have over done the FS thing or because we are used to seeing over done skin and she just happens to have pefect skin, so we think it is over done editing. Her eyes also have that look of perhaps having been a bit over done, or are they actually like that. If you have edited her complection and eyes then your skills are good but for me, easing back 10% would be much better, more naturally perfect, whereas here she looks unnaturally perfect, a bit.
Lighting; It seems odd to me that her hat brim is not causing more shade on her upper face. This is perhaps adding to the sens of unnaturalness. You might have pulled back your reflector, just a couple of feet or so, or raised it a tad so the brim still has some darkening effect, which we expect to have.
Lens choice/perspective. I like the fact that you are quite close in and we get that intimate feeling of being there, sharing a moment with her. This is quite powerful. I don't know what focal length you used to shoot this but if on a FFDSLR it seems about 50mm. I wonder if a very slightly more distant pov with a very slightly longer lens, easy with a zoom but perhaps a problem with primes, would have made the image slightly less dramatic and more natural. But again these are all my views of your judgement calls and you have considerable skills so your calls are just as valid as mine, or anyone elses. All my cc is that you have over done stuff, but only so very slightly, and that is both easy to complain about and hard to call when doing the work.
Bottom line this image works and she looks lovely and you have a lot of skills with your camera and editing, assuming she is not just unnaturally perfect. Very well done.
Ian I am beginning you hate seeing eyes in photos as every single critique you give you say the eyes have been over edited. Some cases its true as for some reason the majority of newbies I see posting on her really love to dodge the hell out of the whites of an eye even though usually an eye white isn't truly white. But in this case the eyes look great and hardly touched, especially considering he didn't even remove the veins.
Leo, Great pic. I love the nice contrast between her face and the dark underside of the hat. Also the crop looks perfect. I'm a huge fan of making sure the eyes fall well into the upper third of a horizontal portrait.
Very funny, adam. Sounds like you are now seeing them as you should, as an experienced pro/enthusiastic photographer. We see they are usually either not done at all, and that is fine, or over done, and that is not fine. Photoshop is like a sports car. It does not make us go faster but but it allows us to do so, and makes it easy and fun. Our insurance companied know that when a middle-aged driver with an exemplorary no-claims record has his mid-life crisis and buys a Jaguar or Porsche he may become more dangerous than at any time in his last 20 years.
I do think, in this shot the eyes in particular are un-naturally "eye catching" because of another problem I also mentioned, namely the lack of shade from the hat brim, making her lovely eyes un-naturally bright, which given how wonderfully big they are, is a bit surreal.
I did write PERHAPS her eyes were A BIT OVER DONE or ARE THEY ACTUALLY LIKE THAT. My point being that just a very very few people have eyes or skin that are/is so perfect that they look as if they are over edited. On the other hand, over edited pictures of people who are less perfect are very common, so when we have a rare perfect person they can't help looking over edited, to us pro/enthusiast photographers at least, who are sensitised to the enthusiastic editing. I could not tell if this beauty is a rare perfect girl or the rather more usual girl who has been very slightly over edited, by just the smallest degree.
In fact you write "her eyes look great HARDLY TOUCHED", indicating you think they look just slightly edited. In my view if they look touched, at all, they are over done. People are free to disagree. Of course, if this girl's eyes are not edited but are a gift from her maker then she is very lucky and I am even more impressed.
In short, my view is, on a casual look, if the skin or the eyes seem even a bit as if they are edited, so not 100% natural, then the editing is over done. The trick is to improve so they just avoid going to the point where the edit is noticable. In a portrait we don't expect a face to look as perfect as a model's face in a cosmetic advert for; Yves St Laurent or Channel. It becomes a question of context and appropriateness, and age of course. Beauty models are not normally 60+ and those amazing looking women who do get to their later years and still do that work are not made to look like they are still 20.
So when we FS photographers ask for CC do we want flattery and compliments or opinions on what is good and how we may have done even better, so we can learn.
Still, all that said, she looks wonderful. So this is a very good portrait of a real beauty.
Its just in style right now to really edit up the eyes for many portrait photographers. Often times as in the case with guys like Lods Franck from Strasbourg, France, it is way over the top. While I find it personally a delicate line of going overboard I like some of the interesting results.
Adam, absolutely agree, thanks a lot for taking your time to comment, cheers!
Thanks Ian, she is both perfect and not, obviously some skin work for little dots, for the rest she has perfect skin, no shadow from the hat because the reflector filled all the shadows. Thank you for your review, cheers
Adam, absolutely agree, thanks a lot for taking your time to comment, cheers!
I half suspected she was one of those rare beauties who need next to no editing. You are so lucky to work with a girl like that. Very pretty.
Thanks for the reply.
I also feel something weird when I look into her eyes. To me it looks like they are bit too... big? Maybe it is how she looks like, yet I already tried few times to shape/move eyes just a little bit and I ended up with similar results as on this photo, where it was "kind of" OK, but makes this weird feeling that something is looking unnatural. That would be question to author, was there any shape modification (liquify/puppet warp) done? Or only small FS and D&B?
Especially her right eye seems unnatural bigger than left eye (more than it should from perspective) - could it be 50mm perspective distorsion?
None, the shape of the eyes was not altered in any way, D&B only!
Damn, so weird... Is it possible to see before version then? Maybe D&B does something weird, can't say. I dont see any stron D&B on the photo, but it might be that the gradation is well done, yet lighthing come out unnatural?
Perfect, nothing else.
Ciao!
Thanks!