Reply To: Can I have a critique please?

[ebi]

@browneyedgirl – we call it flare in the real world, but whatevs. That was not flare. That was an attempt to make it look like flare. Had it been flare, I wouldn’t have been able to make such a very quick and easy curves adjustment to make it the right contrast. also looking at the angle of the sun in relation to the angle of the camera and with her being so low, there is no light getting into her lens.

The sun in this scenario is not direct. It is backlight. So it creates an edge on the girl. And if you use something to black that out, you are also most likely blocking off the rest of the light resulting in no light and an even flat image. Highlight/hairlight/sidelight is not a bad thing. But it has to be controlled, especially for print b/c if there is no information then the printer won’t lay down ink making the photograph look really bad in print. You would, of course want to scrim off direct sunlight or change the scenario, in the situation where the light is direct. but this is not that. You may want to consider playing around with not completely blocking the light but shading it with a scrim jim and 1-2 stop diffusion. way lighter and easier to hold than a blanket.

http://fjwestcott.com/product-category/westcott/reflectors-and-scrims/scrim-jim/

On further evaluation of Aevey’s photos, I think the effect she might have added was an improper use of the high pass filter in photoshop – at least in a few of the images. I use it for sharpening and sometimes softening images in conjunction with other actions. It would be great if she came back and had a little bit of an open dialogue with us about her process, but evidently she prefers to focus on copyright nonsense – reason #5958303 that fauxtographers don’t seem to get better.