Inner Child

McMommy · May 13, 2010

So a photographer friend of mine borrowed her gorgeous buddy to model for us, so we could practice. This is one of my favorite shots of the whole evening. It's all natural light, around 7:30pm near the beach and sunset. We had a LOT of fun... can you tell?

Please feel free to leave any feedback you have for me!

There is minimal pp on this, I think I only bumped the contrast up a tiny bit and cropped it a tiny bit. That's big for me!! LOL

Bitter Jeweler · May 13, 2010

I love the back lighting.

I do find the sun to be bothersome.

The only thing I can think of to have done this better, would have been to get higher, and shoot down a little more to exclude the blown sun. But you know, hindsight is 20/20 and ladders aren't always available.

bigboi3 · May 13, 2010

i love the shot. very playful!!

Derrel · May 13, 2010

It looks to me like the limb she's hanging from and her body are a tiny bit out of focus...like the AF system locked onto the background a few feet behind her. Her legs and feet definitely look out of focus. The lighting and location are really nice. I wish the grasses at the bottom were not overexposed quite so much. This type of lighting, late afternoon backlighting, can be very tricky to work in. You've got the chance for lens flare, and the exposure is very critical; it's almost mandatory to shoot in RAW mode, and then lift the curves up in post processing, in order to keep the highlights from being blown, and to sort of "re-construct" and "lift" the lower tonal values,and keep them dark enough to look like late afternoon backlighting, and also to render the delicate rim lighting and back-lighting on things like her outline, and the grasses and foliage.

I really do like the out of focus branch on the left hand side; I think it would be nice to have included a bit more of that OOF branch there, to create a stronger impression of peering past the foreground foliage and looking into the scene. What is nice about this scene and this photo is it shows a simply beautiful 1)location and 2)time of day and 3)typical results of combining the right location with the right time of day.

Your photo shows a great location and a great time of day. Can you say "follow-up shoot"???