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Hi all,

I thought I'd ask for some feedback. There were a tonne of images, but here are a few examples. These were shot in colour on a 20D and all worked on a bit in potatoshop.

It was my first go with the camera. All done indoors one Saturday at our hair salon.

Rob


(I have very thick skin, and I want to become VERY good at this so feel free to rip em! )

Rob,

Interesting images. The lighting especially - #2 for instance - you have the primary light on the back of the model's head, and his face in shadow but you've retained detail in his face while not blowing the highlights.

Good work.

As a general rule, I'm not overly fond of portraits being shot in landscape mode - think about why portrait mode is so named . That said, your use of negative space here is effective, and these images don't suffer too much IMHO from this "ailment".

But I'd like to see more work done on the B&W conversion. These are not, to me, B&W images; they're soft greys, rather than B&W. Can you show me really sold black in any of them?

No, not really. But B&W needs to enjoy a full range of shading, from a full on, rich deep black, to a pure white.

Play with the conversion a little more, and see what you can come up with.

What Gary said! Need some black, they're just too flat.

I like #3 best. #2 has some funny little highlights on the models face I'd try to avoid next time and being centered in the composition doesn't work, where #3 uses the negative space with more effect.

Yes, my fave is 3 for the white space usage, but I like 1 as it's the 'blackest' of the lot.

I remember when we did these the issue we had was it's a 'hair shoot' and as we took the blacks down to black we lost detail in the hair. This is a real issue so we had to pull it back.

I guess this comes down to my skill at photoshop. Does anyone have any pointers as to how you can take the black down and still maintain detail in the hair?

The only thing I can suggest for photoshop, is to play around with either the curves, or the levels. not that I know what I am doing, but those are the two areas where I tend to mess with B&W.

Of course if someone who actually knows their stuff suggests anything, then my advice would be to ignore me.