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Hi guys, as u know i have been organising this for awhile! 3 girls turned up and it took all day!! the make-up artist friend of mine spent ALL DAY doing his thing and made the chicks look beautiful...not that they wernt already! a friend of his that does wedding photography turned up to help me out and give me sum pointers, he helped immensly by basically taking control of the posing etc! i also borrowed his 50mm and his sigma 500 flash too Remember i have only been using my SLR for a month, before that i have never even touched one!
for a backdrop we went to spotlight and bought plain black fabric ($3 mtr) and masking taped it to the walls! ...my Ebay flash setup worked brillently and i am VERY impressed!@!!! the last 2 shots of ANGIE were taken by me alone, no one else was in the house at the time, she was amazing and posed compleately unassisted and knew exactly what i was looking for! lets just say i am overly joyous with what i produced, i was expecting good but fairly avg shots from an amatuer like me!!!! filled my hard drive to the max lol! and around 800 shots later
Please C & C welcome, bare in mind that these are heavily compressed and only quickly colour corrected in PP
Thanks Guys
Jeremy

for your first try your doing well

i bet your most happy with the last one
I can tell, it's really good because it has that fringe of hair blows up a little
movement is always good

the white balance however on the last 2 is warm but suits the image

regarding your lighting i can see you used 2 lights on either side on the first one, good work getting rid of all those shadows

take note next time on your white balance

Nice lighting setup and backdrop. I can't fault anything except your choices in preservation of copyright. A bit too drastic IMO, but if you felt the need; each to their own.

Nice work. I find the watermark quite annoying though...

Like fist and last.

Alex

You have some great results for a first, and for being one month into SLR, they look great!!!

Last one is my pic, but the reason is not your direct influence.

You have a black background, and black clothes. The two blend together, and then you lose the outline of the model (which is sometimes something you want, useful trick when you need to hide attributes), or fade out. Not necessary in this case. You can see what I mean uf you compare the seperation in the grey shorts, to the black dress and blouse in the earlier shots.

This could be overcome in a number of ways. Different color/shade clothes, different color background, use flesh to provide the seperation (such as hands on hips, or use of arms), highlighting the side of the subject, or backlighting the backdrop (hard to do with black). Each of these are a lesson in themselves, just sharing with you what I have been learning in the last few months. I too went to spotlight, and bought the $3/m fabric, and am using it in my next shoot (shoots to date have been on white backgrounds, which provide easy seperation).

Movement, eyecontact, and pose is great in the last one.

Watermarks kind of distracting when critiquing, maybe you could take them off the subject, place to side, in this audience (but thats your call).

The second shot the subject has nice shiny hair, and you have captured that well through accurate exposure and light placement no doubt.

Very impressed. I'm sure you found it quite a handful working with so many people in one day too, very admirable!

cheers and regards,
Oz

Good work for your first time. I also can't stand the watermark and feel you've seriously over-compressed these files as well.

Keep practising tho, as Wendell will tell you; it's a tough gig to crack =]

Thanks Heaps fellas! im very happy with what i have created here! yes im sorry they are alittle too compressed and the watermark is a PITA!! i just posted them on a few other unrelated forums so i wanted total cover!!
I thought about the background as soon as she pulled out her blacks skirt etc i unfortunatly had no control over the outfits etc i did suggest a grey for the background with a dim light behind it in the middle to kind of blow out the centre but Paul wasnt convinced so maybe on my own workings i can play around with the BG
i used Nathan's sigma 500 DT flash and mi gawd am i in love! i got sum VERY good results without flash but that was mainly with his 50mm as my 18-55 is only a f4.5 so i just couldnt break that to get a brillant image compared to the 50mm....must buy items...speedlite...50mm lens!
In regards to the WB i had been struggling previosu to the shoot as the reflection off the polished wood floor was "browning" everything. after placing the large lounge rug over the floor and Nathan showing me the grey card way of WB'ing and that just made it all good my PP was alittle hastened so that has not helped

Thanks again guys, i am posting a few more pics in a min in a new post

Jeremy, I like the first and last shots but would have preferred to see the shots without the watermark - at least if you had put it in less crucial locations.
As it is it just makes it harder for us amatuers to critique and comment on the shots.

Nonetheless IMHO you are on the way to some great shots. Well done.

Keep working on the shots.

Cheers, Mick

on watermarking images, I was really impressed by a guy I saw on dpreview.com, who used to get really creative with his watermarks ... if you search dbase for a guy called 'schutze' or something like that, check out his watermarks ... really cool

Like Oz_Beachside has said,

I think your blacks really need to be separated. Whether you do this through lightening the entire thing up or feathering with curves...

Also, I think that your colours are a bit too saturated in the tones of the flesh.

Interesting though.