A simple post turns lengthy

I love black & white images. B&W photos in magazines always catch my attention and this was the first thing I thought of when converting this. I wanted the image to have the feel of something you would see in Vogue or something similar. There's so much I like about this image. This is one of my favorites from the shoot. The pose was all Ally (I didnt' direct her at all in this shot) and everything just came together. The way her left leg runs parallel with the shape of the rock on the left. The gentle S-Curve with her left hand adds another dimension. And then there's the angle of her head which runs parallel with her right leg. The more I study this photo, it IS my favorite from the session.

I have been doing a lot more reading & studying lately to take my photography to the next level. A few months ago, I started getting bogged down and getting frustrated with my images. I felt like I was at a stand-still with my images and my post-processing. I would sit at the computer for hours on one image playing with different settings and get nowhere. I ended up having a 3 month break from photo sessions and I feel like the break I took was the best thing I could do. I started critiquing the crap out of my images and making a real assessment of where I was going with an image before I even touched a tool in Photoshop. There are a lot of great photographers out there and I can become frustrated easily when comparing my work to theirs. That's part of what drives me to outperform my last shoot. Take the good and the bad from a shoot and learn from it. More of my reading lately has to deal with the actual shoot and the posing. I feel really good about my latest post techniques but you need a great starting image. A lot of my late nights are spent looking at ads, watching movies, and I find myself watching more commercials on TV lately. It usually takes me a while to get through a movie because I am looking at the lighting or the camera angle and trying to dissect the shot so I can improve my abilities and give the client images that they are truly happy with.

I know I have said this what seems like a thousand times this week, but working with Ally was what I needed to get inspired again. I'm just giving credit where credit's due so thanks again Ally. And a huge thanks to Rob for setting up the shoot. Everything just came together at a perfect time for me.

I was just going to post the B&W image tonight but I wanted to see what people's opinions of the color shot were as well. For those that made it through the text of my post tonight, thanks for hanging in there while I aired some thoughts.


Oh yeah, I finally got around to updating my website to take out the wedding section considering I am concentrating on my portraiture and commercial-type work. I also changed the image on the home page to the B&W image posted tonight.

I will be posting a few more images over the weekend so check back in. Enjoy the weekend.