Sweetness and Light

I like the pose, the expression, and the lighting. Clearly she has a great face. However, I have a couple of technical issues with the image. First, there's some odd bands running around her arm and across her lower back. I don't know if you edited out a bra strap or something with Photoshop or if it's some kind of scan artifact or what, but it's definitely a distraction. Second, the vanity lights aren't aligned vertically - if they weren't right on the edge of the frame it probably wouldn't have mattered, but with the top light cropped and the bottom one not cropped, it becomes an issue. Finally, there's a lot of distraction in the mirror. Is that a light box behind her head?

That is a reflector showing up in the mirror, curse it all. As for the bands, I don't know what they are. The lowest one is probably a flesh fold caused by the twist of her back; but the other stuff is probably scan artifacts. The scan was done by someone else, so I'm going to do it over and see what happens.

 

In this shot, the light coming at the model from the vanity lights and those coming from the camera side measured as equal on my incident meter. I'm trying to decide if the camera-side lights should have been one stop brighter. What do you think? BTW, this was daylight film; the camera-side lights were tungsten--filtered to daylight temperature. The vanity lights, obviously, were even warmer than 3200 K.

 

Thanks for looking at the shot and taking time to drop me a note.