Reply To: Check it out

[soaringturkeys]

now now. Don’t act like an insecure puppy just cause you had a bad review. Be confident in your work instead of ruffling up your feathers like a begrudged peacock. Saying who you shoot for means nothing in an industry where you are only as good as your next shoot. Anyway his comment was unwarranted but you definitely didn’t take it very well.

He doesn’t need to show you anything. His opinion, wrong or right, is as valid as the next person. It’s really how you take it that matters. Does a food critique need to cook a meal for a chef everytime he gives out a bad review? Despite popular belief, sometimes people do have good/ if not better opinions than the people themselves. It’s really how you take it that counts.

Anyway.

Your comment on the different aspects of photography  is quite wrong. If you want to get even further in the industry, then you’ll need to throw away the assumption that lighting, exposures and angles are more important than the subject.

Sure they are a vital key to photography. Don’t get me wrong. But there are plenty of people around the world that can operate a camera to its fullest. There is no shortage of people who can shoot as good, if not better than us technically. But you have to realise the most important thing is the subject.

How you interact with the subject, how you make them feel comfortable etc. Sure they don’t have the ‘victoria secret confidence’ but as a photographer you should be able to feed them that confidence. Look at Chase Jarvis and how he shoots. He would say that communication and the relationship between subject and photographer is far more important than the camera itself.

You also need to look at learning how to do retouching. With the genre that you are in, it’s essential that your retouching is great – or at least pay people to do it for you.

For example this photo. I’ll use this cause it has the most skin to analyze.

http://www.modelmayhem.com/portfolio/pic/29180097

Entry level analysis

– She has bra marks by her side and breasts.

– She has wrinkly armpits

– her nails needs to be consitent

– the curvature of her back by her tatoo needs to be fixed

You’ve somewhat retouched her face, but it seems as though you left the entire body out. The skin between her face and neck is so completely different. I said entry level because i know you can do this, you did this to her face. I just feel like leaving the rest out is a tad lazy.

Now to take your retouching to the next level you need to

Dodge & burn quite a bit of the shadows and highlights

You need to even out her skin tone on her side breasts. at the moment it’s teetering on blueish.

The skin tone on her face (and i’m assuming that she’s wearing make up) is quite different tone to her body. Now if you are going to do shots like this again, then you’ll have to either make up her body or just fix it in Photoshop.

 

Anyway thats it for me. I’m not going to show you my works cause well i don’t need to prove you anything. You can take this or learn from this. up to you.