Quick Portraits - C&C Welcome

[Sailor Blue]

After a glamor/erotic session last week end my model asked me to do a quick portrait of her in the cap and top she had been wearing for the photo shoot. She was in a hurry to be off but I did grab a couple of quick shots. Not my best work, but I thought it would be interesting to see what flaws others picked up.

I'll start off with saying that the shirt shouldn't be wrinkled like it is. I should have taken the time to straighten it out. In the second image that isn't a tag, it is a butterfly tattoo peaking out.

Sandy 001


Sandy 002

[kridsada]

here is how i like to see it. here i used solid black as background. and used
calculation command to mask the girl. then used guassian blur
to blur the mask and repainted the mask ,again blured the mask and painted it .
i am not good in masking. The advantage of repeated bluring and painting
the mask is that it is easier to hide the imperfections in masking.

[Sailor Blue]

Thank you kridsada.

I thought of using a vignette but in general I don't like the effect. I also thought about extracting the model and placing her against a pure white or black background. Your modification is more interesting.

[Steven G Webb]

Sailor I prefer your original renditions to the edit. I think you did a fine job controling spill from the background, as evidenced by the good contrast on the subject. Thanks for sharing.

[kridsada]

well i feel i over did it. i am not good in masking. your post processing skills
are much better then me. For you to extract the girl and put it into any
other background without anyone suspecting that background is changed
is easier .It appears it should be easy to do it with this picture.

[Sailor Blue]

Songman45, I appreciate your comment about controlling the spill, but I don't deserve any credit. I only used two lights with shoot through 32" umbrellas. The key was about 6'-8' away and model left and up. The fill was about 10' (really too far away) model right, and just below eye height. The lighting was pretty flat, but I had to do that to get light up under the brim of the cap. The background was a wall with a very light cream color. The model was only about 3' from the wall.

I think the wrinkles in the shirt are the biggest problem with the image, but the model tied it up because she wanted a bare midriff. That made getting rid of the wrinkles impossible. I should have made her untie it and smoothed the shirt out.

I don't like the bare midriff in the first image, and that is the one I'm going to give her. Cropping to 8"x10" gets rid of that problem. That crop also cuts off the arm above the elbow, which is wrinkled from not being slightly bent outward.

This model has a tendency to slump, which she is doing in the first image. I fought with her about this all through the modeling session. Almost every time she moved she slumped. Unfortunately I didn't keep her straightened up with her shoulders back often enough.

One of Benji's Rules of Good Portraiture is to avoid bare arms. The underarm wrinkles shows why this is good advice. I could reduce their visibility without removing them, but frankly that is too much work in this case since they are shot as part of my learning process.

I am old school - get it right in the camera so you don't have to crop later. Unfortunately I tend to crop too tight in the camera as you can see in these two images.

It would have been easy to simply raise the camera a tiny bit to add some space above the head and lose some of the midriff region in the first image, which I should have done. If necessary I could add some space above the head in Photoshop, but again it isn't worth it for these images.

The crop is too close to the model's breasts in the second image as well as too close to the top of her head. The chopped off arm doesn't help either.

The color balance is off a bit with these images, which I corrected later.

I'm sure there are other flaws I just can't see and would appreciate it if anyone would point them out.

I consider myself a rank beginner at portrait/glamor/nude/erotic photography. I have been very reluctant to post images because I see too many flaws in them. Even though I see quite a few flaws in these images I was fairly pleased with them, which is why I posted them and asked for c&C, and I do appreciate any C&C I receive. I'll try to post more from time to time.