gstark wrote:Chris,
Except for the selective colouration, the first one is superb.
here is the shot without selective colouring. personally i prefer the colourised shot but i can understand that selective colouring is not to everyones liking.
for whatever reason, smugmug's compression is terrible and the shots have lost the razor sharp edge that i loved. the flickr version, (particularly of the first), is far better.
I'd like to see better shadow degradation in the second; the falloff on the lh side of your wife's face is a tad harsh for my taste. I'm also not a great fan of the landscape orientation for a portrait shot: I think it works well when you have, say, a contextual background that justifies its use; I'm not convinced it works in this instance.
agreed on both counts. the sunset was so gorgeous and i only had a minute or so to get this shot. i love the way the sunset and the key light works here but my framing is awful and i didnt take enuf time to work on a bit of fill. as you and alpha pointed out, the shot certainly shows the design issues with the softbox. the light falloff is steep as hell, i will have to make some
modifications to the design. perhaps some double diffusion or another diffusion material. will work on that this weekend.
Can you milk a little shadow detail from the rh side of the third image? I do like what you've done here; perhaps a reflector to camera right to just throw a little more light on the subject?
interesting. i have quite a few frames where i did just that with a white card and i didnt like them initially. i may have to revisit and post them up.
Alpha_7 wrote:Was this a self portrait, or did someone else take the shot, as you've nailed the focus, which isn't easy either way.
tis a selfie. took me about 20 frames to get the focus point right. annoying as hell actually i almost gave up.
love the use of the crystal glasses, and the warm from them were they using CTO's on your SB200s ?
2x cto, 1x red.
Great bokeh - I assume this one is opened wider then the last, unless you've played with subject/camera/background distances.
yepp, you nailed it, i moved the glasses well back to get that nice rounded bokeh.
thanks for the valuable feedback guys, much appreciated. will work on that softbox today.