Jessie (5)

Shes a great model and the light and colors is great here too. If it would have been possible I would have liked to avoid the light from hitting the wood in the background or try a shorter DOF tho make the environment more calm.

Best regards Tore

This woman just knocks me out Alain, I'm smitten! :-) She has some of the most killer eyes I have ever seen and that little cleft in her chin is very sexy!

A couple of suggestions. The chopped wood in the background is a little distracting. Call me anal, but I guess it's that "alles im Ordnung" thing of mine, but the slightly askew lines of the boards on the left bugs me a little. I darkened and blurred the background and straightened the lines.  

Tore and Scott: thanks a lot for your interesting suggestions! I'll make a new version with some blur in the background. Scott, now that you mention it, those lines are obviously not vertical, you're right. But I'm trying myself to get rid of my obsessional tendancies. So I'll actively ignore your correct observations =) Best regards, Alain

The new image will be visible tomorrow. I finally followed Scott's suggestion about verticality too... sigh...

this looks beautiful with one little exception (about that later).  The framing, the settings, the colour combination, and her look are striking.  Her clothes reveal just enough for this kind of setup.  My only gripe with it is the look on her face.  It is as if a bold eagle is watching a prey.  Maybe you intended it so, and if that is the case, you've done an excellent job.  But my heart would like to see some friendliness in those facial lines.  After all, country girls are knows for showering people with their smiles, no?  (But hey, if I had to chop all that wood, I'd give any photographer an intense stare, as well :-) .)  Cheers, Micheal

Micheal: thanks for your comment! After this shooting I only have a couple of photos with Jessie smiling. She's a pro model. She's not used to smile during the shootings I guess. I may post one of those few pictures though, because she's strinkingly beautiful when she smiles or laugh too! Best regards, Alain

Your model is very pretty.

I like the lighting here well distributed and so even bringing out all of the nice textures of this beautiful face and its skin tone, the pose is remarkable and the model is competent and relaxed which is another great add to the quality of this work.

I also like the wood she is laying on and the great details of its texture work, the model hair is lit in a superb form to get it so well separated from the black ground while the eyes are remarkably pulling the viewer attention to her.

Thank you for sharing this wonderful work and wishing you all of the best.

Alain,

Jessie is indeed a beautiful girl. You have focused very well on her eyes. I do like her rather high fashion make-up. Her eyes really stand out (in a good way). With her make-up, I think her somewhat intense expression works well. I love her skin tone. The contrast and color saturation is excellent. Even though she has black hair against a black background she is very well separated from the background -- excellent work! Jessie's clothing goes very well with the location.

I do like the looks of Scott's Photoshopped background. To be honest with you, The wood in the lower right was far enough out of focus and dark enough that it really didn't bother me. If I wanted to get rid of the wood in the background, I would have just replaced it with the black above it. The blurred look doesn't look quite the same as being out of focus caused by a short depth of field, to me. It looks unnatural -- like it was blurred using a photo editing program or something.

Scott must have better eyesight than I do, which isn't saying a whole lot. I didn't notice that the vertical lines in the wood on the left (her right) was not vertical. After reading his comment I even measured it. I couldn't find a difference in the distance from the left side of the frame to the opening by Jessie at the top and bottom of the picture. Oh well, Scott's "straightening" of of the wood looks excellent, too. ...I went back and remeasured. OK Scott, you're right. The top is about 2 or 3 angstrom units (Å) to the right compared to the bottom. As you age your eyesight becomes progressively worse -- among other things that I won't go into at this time.

I don't care for the right angle (90˚) at her left elbow. It is not a particularly feminine angle. Her left hand looks quite graceful. I would position is a bit higher or lower on the edge of the wood to increase of decrease the angle at her elbow. If she goes lower on the wood she should really position her fingers facing down because her hand will be below her waist. I don't like the way the fingers on her right hand are creeping around the edge of the wood. They look disembodied -- like they could belong to someone else -- yuck! 

She has lovely tiny hips and her right shoulder is partially hidden behind the wood wall, so I think she looks fine posed straight on to the camera. But, ... if her body was turned a tad so that is was posed at an angle to the camera, it would look a little thinner, more feminine and graceful. Her right leg in front of her left leg is a nice feminine looking touch.

With her very good make-up her fingernails look a little pale. They almost look like a continuation of her fingers -- the colors being so similar. Even a little pink color would help separate her fingernails from her fingers.

You have used very interesting lighting on her. Your main light is coming from below her eyes. It is a little hard to tell because you don't really have distinct catchlights below her pupils, but the shadow from her nose does angle upward on her face. The name for this style of lighting is grotesque lighting. It has been (and still is) used in video and still photography to light vampires, werewolves, bad witches and other rather nefarious nocturnal nasties. Unless you are trying to make this girl out to be a very bad person, you probably should not use this lighting. I'm sure you have seen kids trying to make a scary face by holding a flashlight below their face and shinning it up to illuminate their face. It’s the same idea with this style of lighting. This style of lighting does work very well around Halloween time. If she had a little different clothing on it might work better for her. You have filled in the shadows enough to keep her from looking too spooky. I am sure there are many guys that wouldn't mind having her bite them on the neck, even with this style of lighting.

Your photograph is a little right heavy. It would be good to crop some off the left side, add some to the right side or a combination of both. You want to compositionally balance the left and right sides of the photograph. The compositional "rule" for this suggests that you position the tip of the subject's nose in the vertical center of the photograph. This little rule almost always works well.

Nice shot,

Mark

Rashed: thanks for kind words. They are appreciated!

Mark: thanks a lot for your numerous suggestions! I'll try to keep them in mind for my next shootings.

I think you didn't read my comment above. The image that you can see now is not the original one anymore but a second version after Tore and Scott's suggestions. On the original one, the lines on the wood were clearly not vertical. The wood behind was slightly brighter and sharper. I darkened and blurred it only a little because too many artifacts would appear, especially along Jessie's legs. And you're right about the blur quality problem. But I'm very happy of their suggestions, because they clearly improved the image.

The ground in front of Jessie was very bright and we were under some kind of roof. That's why an important amount of the light is coming from below. Here I like it, though. Funny that you mention those things about "grotesque lighting" because a few days ago I asked Jessie if she would agree to make some "vampire" shooting. Wouldn't she make a fascinating one?

Best regards, Alain

One thing I have done on all my cameras is to remove the focusing screens on my Nikon F2's, F4 and Hasselblad 500CM and, with an extremely sharp pencil and steel ruler, marked in both sets of vertical and horizontal thirds lines, using a micrometer to make sure they were as exactly straight as I could get them. It is a huge help when it comes to composition and maintaining striaght lines straight, especially in architectural photography. My D700 already has them marked, however they are in quarters and not thirds (go figure). I just estimate the thirds in that case. The lines in the D700 are obviously not on the screen itself but internal to the prism.

I have an aftermarket microprism screen (actually a modified Canon Ec-A screen from focusingscreen.com) for the D700 as I do not, nor will I most likely ever, own an autofocusing lens and the standard D700 screen really sucks for critical manual focusing, especially with lenses like my AIS 105mm f/1.8 and 85mm f/1.4 which have paper thin DoF wide open, unless there are very sharp specular highlights in the frame. I can only assume the Nikon engineers figured that the overwhelming majority of photographers nowadays would not, or very infrequently, use the older full manual AI-S lenses any more with the newer auto-everything DSLR's. Which definitely works in my favor because great condition AIS lenses go for a song on Fleabay! :-)