Maggie.

This is my first attempt a portrait. Maggie was tired of me taking

a long time setting things up. This one didn't seem "posed". All

suggestions welcome. Thanks. dhw

The "unposed" pictures are almost always better than the posed ones, because they say more about the person than the "formal" portrait. Nice work. Bonus for the crisp green colors and lovely skin tones. 6/6.

Interesting and decent in most aspects, however, some things to consider:

What I most like is the apparent irony of having a grumpy or at least somber photo of someone in what looks like a chearleading outfit.

I'm too picky, but if I were to modify things I would....Definatley light the background seperately and probably use black seamless instead of black cloth, as black on black is hard enough to separate when the textures are different. Also, I would most likely crop the photo differently and get her body out of the center of the photo, I might also consider intensionally rotating the crop and coming in closer. All the cropping changes speak to the fact that I personally prefer that the subject not have even amount's of space around it unless it is a straiforward portrait.

 

This advice on cropping has to be taken with the consideration of whom you are trying to please: i.e. I actually cropped a client portrait once in what was to my experience a very strong artistic/commercial way and speant a long time going back and forth with options, I dropped it of to them and got a call saying that they wanted me to redo the print because I had rushed through it and not even bothered to get the head in the middle. The client was a friend of my mother's and they told her before coming to me. Even she explained that the cropping was done intentionally, but I ended up redoing the print to make them happy. The same happened with another shoot, and I redid it; on a related note, I am now in the process of transitioning to the commercial/advertising end of the market.....