marcinwuu

Playing with tilt to get as little DOF as possible, while keeping the

face in the plane of focus. Tell me what you think - thanks in advance.

Uh. There's no way (that I can see) to edit the caption, so I have to put it in here. The ugly compression artifacts and banding are introduced by photo.net's uploading engine. The original is pretty smooth, clean and detail is pretty well defined.

I'd really like to hear some C&C possibly from a portraitist's point

of view. Thanks in advance.

I wonder what's your take on this one. Thankyou in advance for any

opinion :)

I'd love to hear your critique on this. (but I already know that nose

is not centered ;))

Thankyou for the time and good word :)

Marc - what you write is interesting but I find it a tad bit too generic. I almost see it ctrl-c&ctrl-v'd from your other critiques ;) Surely, not everything on every portrait should be done by the book.

I'll try and explain myself a bit - the weakest point of this photo is the arm, but her face is so cute it almost makes up for it. That's why I decided to put in online anyway. The composition point you've given me (center the nose) wouldn't work here - the composition would become loose, with no tension at all. I made her look left while facing right exactly to build tension in the portrait - add some character if you will.

The narrow depth of focus is used to bring attention to the eyes, which are the main points of the image. I admit to being a huge fan of shallow DOF btw. Softness of the photo is caused by the wide open lens - I found this softness works very well for portraits. Shadow across the eye is intentional ofcourse - this is one of the most beautifull effects of the butterfly lighting, this shadow. I'm also not happy about no catchlight in the other eye, but it was not possible to achieve with this lighting scheme without changing the shadow placement. So I had to choose - and I chose shadows over catchlight. I could've removed the reflection of the reflector on the eye, but i decided not to. It's an unmanipulated photo (except for crop from square) and I'd wanted to keep it that way.

I agree about the pose - it's not the best... but as I said before - her face makes up for it :)

Thanks for your time.

Oh, one more thing - her name is not Audrey - It's just that she reminds me of one famous hollywood actress. Hence the title :)

Thankyou for all the comments, I really appreciate it.

While many of the points you raised are valid and interesting, I feel I need to explain some of the decisions I took with this snapshot:

The hairlight is deliberately blown out. This is something I remember fondly from the classic shots by Hurrell and all of his followers. It's not necessarily a good thing, I'll be the first to admit, but it's a part of the style :) And, somehow, it works... for Hurrell at least.

The sides are not really that much darkened - I use a very directional light pointed straight at the model's face, which enhances any vignette effects I'll throw at the photo during the postprocess. Again, part of the style I'm trying to recreate here.

Composition - I don't like too much of a negative space in portrait. A personal preference again - not always a good thing... I chose to make the shoulders and the V of the collar to be the base of this shot. Square format almost always calls for center-heavy composition, at least for me.

Again, thankyou. I'll try and heed your advice for my next shots :)

I'm new here, and would really like to hear your thoughts on this one.

Thanks :)