Larry, I hear you, but contrast and skin tones can be tricky things to reconcile.
You need to know that this image resulted from a session that I told the model was like practicing musical scales for me: lighting practice and experimentation. I was trying out things to see their effect, without the usual pressure to produce any great images. There was no properly exposed light in this shot really. The side/rim highlight was about one stop over and the fill was two stops below that. So her skin, other than the highlight, was guaranteed to fall into shadow, and in colour tends to look darker and with richer tones. When I saw this shot I knew it was one to edit, and as I did I decided to keep it in colour and experiment with toning the background and the plinth. The bg was dark grey, the plinth light grey and I toned both to tie in with her skin more. I really like the skin tones I was getting here. I am going to do a black and white version. In black and white I can easily increase the body contrast by modifying the tonal curve between the lightest and darkest skin tone values. It's more hit-or-miss to do that in a colour shot as the skin hue will often change in unfortunate ways. > My hunch, is that if your soft fill on fiddle (4' Photek Softlighter) were a > bit brighter and a bit further back, the photo would appeal more to my sense > of aesthetic. Actually, not. Not if you want more contrast on the body in the shadow, anyway. Inverse square law: you need to bring the light source closer and turn it down to get more rapid and deep fall-off, and then you get the strong light/dark contrasts you seek. When you pull a light further away and brighten it to compensate, you get a shallow light fall-off. It's the normal way to light a model who is moving around and who you don't want to have fall into darkness or be overexposed as they do. So it's also low contrast light as a side-effect. Arms was shot with a very hard light source: a single 7" reflector with 15 degree grid and barn doors. Pretty much a spotlight shining on the subject, from about 5 feet away. Hard shadows cast, medium fall-off. I increased the contrast in post, so the shadow areas got somewhat squashed, probably. Less detail there. Thanks for looking and commenting. Appreciate it! On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 3:32 PM, Larry Colen <l...@red4est.com> wrote: > > Bruce Walker wrote: >> >> Despite the title, nsfw. >> >> http://portfolio.brucemwalker.com/index/I0000a6CzeIGEohA > > > For both this and tank, I love the subject, the pose and the composition, > but there is something about the skin tonality in the shadows that doesn't > thrill me. I wish I were able to better diagnose it, maybe someone who knows > more than I do about lighting could explain to me what it is, and how to > avoid it. I hesitate to use the word "fix", because it's an artistic choice > and a photo that I'd like better would not necessarily be one that Bruce > does. > > Subjectively, it seems to me that the lighting in the "shadows" is too flat, > that their isn't enough contrast between the deepest shadows and the > lightest shadows. > > When I look, specifically at the tones, objectively there seems to be a fair > amount of range in the shadows, which is part of where my uncertainty comes > from. > > My hunch, is that if your soft fill on fiddle (4' Photek Softlighter) were a > bit brighter and a bit further back, the photo would appeal more to my sense > of aesthetic. > > In terms of tonality, I do quite like the next one in the series, "Arms". > http://portfolio.brucemwalker.com/index/I0000aZZbCOcFfMg > The odd thing compared with my comments above is that there seems to be even > less range in the shadows. > > I'm also curious how Fiddle study would work as a black and white. >> >> >> I instructed Dorrie to bring something to the shoot to surprise me. So >> she brought her beloved vintage fiddle. She can play, but hasn't for a >> couple of years so we opted for still lifes. >> >> 645z, dfa645 55mm/2.8, f/10, 1/125th sec, 100 iso. >> >> 5' gridded strip softbox camera left slightly behind. >> 4' Photek Softlighter just camera-right in front. >> >> Enjoy! >> > > -- > Larry Colen l...@red4est.com (postbox on min4est) http://red4est.com/lrc > > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > follow the directions. -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
