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Delta II
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Ross, this is an excellent start to your art nude portfolio. Far superior to my first shoots in this genre, which I won’t embarrass myself or anyone else with by publishing online. I think it’s essential for anyone starting in this area to work with a model is experienced in art nude photography and that understands what is involved. Delta is certainly one such model with a lot of experience behind her. And while I’m sure Delta was a key element in the success of these images, I have to say you handled the lighting, exposure and post-processing work extremely well. All in all, it adds up to a set of very successful images.
Can I ask what method you used to convert to monochrome? I’ve recently started experimenting with using the Monochrome Picture Style in DPP and I like the results I’m getting. I’ve also downloaded Canon’s Picture Style Editor with a view to creating my own custom Monochrome Picture Style. It seems to be a very flexible tool well worth checking out, although it does seem to be quite resource intensive which is causing some problems for me on my ancient computer :(
Thanks for your kind words Thorsten. When taking these, I shot in RAW and Mono JPEG, so that I could see a mono image on the lcd screen, but still have the RAW image to work from. I have been using Adobe Lightroom for all my recent work, and I am totally smitten with everything about it. I spent a fair bit of time showing lightroom to Delta when we uploaded onto the laptop in the studio, and she was very impressed with it.
Would you believe that for some of these I simply had to click ‘black and white high contrast’ in the lightroom presets? If I got the lighting right, it just worked a treat, although it can be fine tuned afterwards as you see fit in Photoshop.
Here is another. But for this one, the same preset did not have an effect that I liked, so I may convert it to black and white using another method when I have more time. I am amazed at how good the results are with one octa behind her. I have to clone the four corners of every image to make them white, as the octa didn’t fill the frame, but I just ensured she was all in front of the Octa herself.
Can’t make my mind up whether colour or mono is best, so I did both. I suppose I will have to spend a long time looking at them in order to make my mind up…. :D
Can’t make my mind up whether colour or mono is best, so I did both. I suppose I will have to spend a long time looking at them in order to make my mind up…. :D
Hi Ross,
in the first picture, there’s something about her hand on her bum which looks like it would make an excellent close-up. Something about the contrast of tones and lines….Si
Not a critique of the photos, but of the whites. I calibrate to about 140 cd/m2 on my LCD, so I can clearly see grey outlines around the body. If you can’t try looking at the image with the midtone level pushed towards the white point, it will become really obvious. I’ve found that while it can be hard to seen on screen, it can show up in a print, so I use a soft edge Dodge brush set to 5% or so on Highlights, to brush this away. You need to be careful with the highlight edges on the body though. One other thing that sometimes works (it does here), is to drag the White point back a bit. It cleans up the whites nicely.
I like the poses a lot Ross, great work. I think the last Monochrome is a little dark, running over the image in Curves (where you get the dot on the curve), shows this to be the case (and not my imagination).
Ross, was the Octa idea based on Frank Doorhof’s DVD?
I’m debating doing this setup, but with a V card in front to reflect light in.
Really like these Ross, in particular the extremely tight framing, that boxing in of
your subject. My favourite of these would have to be the first, both lightingwise and
compositionally. As Thorsten mentioned, this is a superb start to your art nude
portfolio. I’d be well chuffed if I managed to achieve anything close to this quality…Rob.
Sorry Sean , just coming back to this. No, I havent seen any silhouette on Franks DVD, so it was just my own idea to shoot in front of the softbox. The softbox is an OCta, so I had to clone the corners of the image white afterwards. I’ll have to look out for the part you mention, maybe you could let me know which DVD it is on?
Thanks for all the comments, I was really very pleased with these myself. Delta knew precisely what I was trying to do, namely ‘frame’ her one way or another inside the image, and I had to guide her through the viewfinder as to height and position of the hands and arms etc.Ross
It’s on the new one. Inside Look 2.
I did some shots like that as soon as I got my Octa, but before Frank did the DVD stuff. It was still great to see it on the DVD.Re the whites, it’s a problem I see on a lot of images. The first time I noticed it really was up on the projector during a camera club slideshow (Doh!), so I’m aware of it from that!
The poses are great.. She does know what to do, I bet this was great when you were doing the shoot!
Aplogies but for personal reasons I have removed the images from their source galleries which means they cannot be viewed here.
Hope fully normal service will be resumed at a later date.
Ross
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