Darker Portrait of my cousin

[laurenvictoria]

Untitled by Lauren Cabanas, on Flickr

I tried to go darker with this one. Is it too dark?

 

[laurenvictoria]

Thoughts?

 

[tirediron]

Paticience little grasshopper - It's Sunday morning. 15 minutes is hardly any time at all to wait for a reply.

IMO, yes, it is too dark. I'd like to see the short side about 1/3 - 1/2 stop brighter and just enough light on the broad side that there's some detail visible.

 

[laurenvictoria]

hows this? wow after posting this i realized theres like no difference from the other. let me try again

 

[laurenvictoria]

lightening it in lightroom isnt really working out because the quality is getting worse and worse. I guess this is something i need to remember for next time

 

[amolitor]

The picture on comment #4 is too lightened, for my taste. The shadow on the near side of his face wants to be black. Let it be black. Don't be afraid of the shadows!

The one problem with this one is the lack of catchlight in the eye -- it makes the eyes go dead to not have a little gleam in there somehow. I don't actually know if this is just an idiom that we've come to expect, or if it's a deeper thing (humans have a lot of neurological wiring that has to do with looking at eyes, and it's at least possible that without the visibly reflected light we find the image unpleasant at a pretty primitive level).

As I recall you kind of liked the ones with the artificially lightened shadows, though? Your photo, your call. The kid's good looking, well posed. The light is strong and interesting (cf Caravaggio light, chiaroscuro), and the framing is quite decent. Someone's probably going to ***** about the top of his head being cut off, or whatever, but the eyes are pretty well placed in the frame which is what matters here.

 

[tirediron]

Work on getting it right in the camera. Post-processing is to ehance an image, NOT to fix it!

 

[laurenvictoria]

Thanks Amolitor, you've been of great help to me! I honestly appreciate it! i definitely want to work on making eyes stand out more. I think It might be a deeper human connection like you said. Eyes say so much.
and so true tirediron, something I need to work on.