Yevgenia (third of a series)

This is Yevgenia, third photo in a sometimes series -- test photos

of a new, amateur model. Please let me know what you think. If you

rate harshly or very negatively, please submit a helpful and

constructive comment/Please share your superior knowledge to help

improve my photography. Thanks! Enjoy! John

Very nice

 

Regards

 

Nikiforos

Thanks for the compliment. (I'll forward it to her -- probably over our next dinner -- platonically of course, as I deliver to her some photos I've processed she's never seen. Nice person. Plus I need to pay her some more money and maybe photograph her again.)

 

John

Is it a price label ???

It was. Sharp eye.

 

Please refresh your browser.

 

It may the closest she ever gets to Macy's or Nordstrom's.

 

Which may account for how close she's holding it.

 

John

John actually I like your work, this picture is very nice but the photos has a lot of compression.

Regards

Antonio

That's better ; )

It's a nice shot, the white background and accessories work well with her clear skin. I like the composition in the square.

Reference the other shots -- since I'm a poor photoshopper (and my camera had some problems with the borrowed studio monolights -- which actually burned - with flames at the end of the session -- I had a problem zeroing in on the flesh color, but my Photoshopping skills keep improving due to necessity.

 

I keep doing different things, and each time I post something different and take a pounding or get disapproval in the ratings that is for reasons that are well-founded, I try to improve -- again reference prior photos in this series, especially the flesh tones.

 

And yes, I did miss the price tag; I had ripped them off on most of the few clothes I had bought; not that particular one.

 

Can't get stuff like that in Dnepropetrovsk - or if you can, I sure wouldn't know where to find it, and Macy's just has it on a counter, and a woman model surely appreciates such stuff to model and if she's real good, as part of her pay.

 

Thanks for the early 'heads up' and keeping the embarrassment to a minimum.

 

John (Crosley)

If you are saying it's JPEG compression with JPEG artifacts, it's saved on JPEG 'maximum' and there is no greater way to save it.

 

But you may be right; it's a group of 'rescued' captures. I had accidentally in taking 'street' photos somehow bumped the 'meter' button of my D2X which is recessed and 'bump-proof' and my exposures were wrong, so the info was there, but the exposures were very dark and had to be corrected in 'levels'.

 

Whaty you may be zeroing in on may be the 'compression' from drawing out the 'narrow band' of the usable info from 'compression' in the histogram into a fully-usable histogram which may have given some artifacts.

 

I'm interested in what yhou zeroed in on to tell, since I didn't look all that carefully - after all when you do all you can, and it looks good enough and you can do no better, and it looks OK, then that's it.

 

So, what tells you it's got an issue with 'compression'?

 

(By the way, the D2X is almost foolproof with the exposure meter being dislodged like this -- whereas the D200 is very easily dislodged and if one finds D200 exposures jumping all over the place, one almost always finds the indicator has been bumped to 'spot meter' - it's just in the wrong place -- about its only bad design for an otherwise simply wonderful camera.

 

I can't imagine how I dislodged the D2X exposure meter to the spot meter setting, since I was wearing it -- maybe it bumped another camera, indenting it and turning it. I have learned now to look whenever I face exposure problems -- instead of focusing (excuse the expression) on the alien studio lights and 'flash' problems -- I was also using an SB800 set manual, lowest, as a flash trigger and 'slaving' the studio lights, which provided the light.

 

Thanks for the feedback. Let me know, please.

 

John (Crosley)

I like the composition of this one but #2 probably has better treatment of the white clothing. I don't shoot glamor but dread trying to get an even exposure with white objects in digital.

The top is beige or 'cream' -- a light off-white, while the pants are totally white -- a slight mis-match, attributable to a man's doing the picking.

 

My fault, not hers.

 

And not the camera's.

 

John

There are those who said (until this shot at least) that I don't shoot glamour either, and maybe even after this.

 

But I'm working on it, in addition to all my other genres -- I'm working on being a 'man for all photographic seasons'.

 

It helps to have an attractive model who is cooperative, understands her role, and likes her body, even if there is a huge language difference, as here.

 

John (Crosley)

Very well done, John.. you nailed it this time!

 

One part of me wants to suggest that you remove the bit of shadow (?) behind her right arm, but that's just getting picky. I can live with or without it. Another thing would be to include more of her legs - maybe go for a portrait format - legs, feet, stool/chair, and maybe some flirty high heals.

 

But aside from all the could-have-been talk... Beautiful lighting, nice and clean, and best of all - tastefull. Regards,

I think that as much as anything, that the 'success' you point to of this photo is part happenstance, and part owing to my re-look at past captures from this same session. I only opened the captures to edit the two previous posts, and then didn't look at them again until a day or so ago.

 

I had posted two other photos and just now simply learned how to read the tightly-compressed images from my digital camera and present them much better, from the same photo session as the previous photos. It's partly a matter of learning 'how to do it' when presented with some horrible exposures.

 

As explained above, my meter was stuck inadvertently on 'spot' and all exposures were 'dark' and tightly compressed, and I had to work 'em up in Photoshop and 'uncompress' 'em. (the readings almost always were on something light or white, causing the exposure to 'darken' the image and I couldn't figure it out since I didn't 'set' the exposure meter to 'spot' and it's almost impossible (not completely impossible) to knock it out of position on the Nikon D2X.

 

The pose is another thing, however, as I stood off, and is partly a matter of various poses attempted and partly my cropping in the digital darkroom. I shot 'large' for part of the session, but for some captures I shot 'tight' and some of those were wonderful.

 

Watch for more posts, but I don't want to make this a huge folder, as I want to go back and shoot more nudes with more women, not just Yevgenia, althogh I also do want to shoot her.

 

She shows well, is good to work with, and a nice person who wants to become famous.

 

Shooting 'glamour' or 'studio nudes' is a new category for me, it requires some new skills, and you're looking at my trying to avoid doing 'porn', for Photo.net, (though, as Seinfeld said, 'there's nothing wrong with that *in its place* which is not Photo.net'.)

 

In a way, it's pretty amazing how 'awkward' this 'natural' photographer feels in manipulating his captures in the studio rather than just recognizing 'opportunites as they appear before him (me) and pushing the shutter at the proper moment.

 

It's pretty unfamiliar territory.

 

And by 'porn' above I mean soft-core which simply translates into 'erotic' maybe, not 'porn' at all, although to some Umericans anything that shows anything at all is 'porn' and makes me a heathen.

 

Well, I've lived long enough to earn the right to become a heathen.

 

A prim neighbor of mine who was a widow, as I grew up when a teen-age youth won a prize as a children's author with her first book and wanted to write a sexy pot-boiler -- and, she reasoned to me that she would, because she said to me 'I know all the words, even though nobody expects that I'll write them all out in a book.'

 

And so that prim dentist's widow and new award-winning children's author broke convention and did write that unexpected sexy and profane potboiler novel.

 

A person doesn't have to be pigeon-holed.

 

I've been looking through Photo Distict News and comparing my many styles with the PDN's 30 featured photographers for 2006 and wonder at how good some of them are, but wonder how many seem to be pigeon-holed into one style or another -- I feel I could work in the styles of many of them.

 

Matt, I always read carefully any comment you make. You're a perfectionist, and I'm not. I'm a guy who wants to rush through things and ace things first chance right away -- the two-second photographer and the one-minute Photoshopper.

 

Maybe this is a sign that I'm developing my Photoshopping skills enough that I have speeded Photoshopping up and beefed image editing up enough (not very much compared to you, because I have no training, and I shoot loads of natural images) that I can attempt to keep image editing within my very short attention span.

 

Thankfully, I say cryptically, there's one thing in life, where I have an infinite attention span, besides writing these commentaries, and that has been a saving grace -- where nothing can distract me and has earned me admirers.

 

At one time it was the practice of law, but that's long gone, and my infinite focus has shifted to another, more pleasant horizon. It's part of why I keep going back to Ukraine, and you may get a hint by looking through my portfolio. Care to guess, Matt? It's another area where I have nailed things.

 

(suggested answers by e-mail only.)

 

;-)

 

John