A sinking feeling

A sinking feeling

As a member of a model and photographer networking website, I often look at the portfolios of people who have liked one of my pictures. And sometimes it’s a dispiriting experience: there are quite a lot of people who have never got past either flash on the camera or a pair of nicely balanced softboxes on either side of the camera. This is often coupled with a camera level that’s a couple of inches above the model’s eyeline and a wide angle lens so that the model perches a large head on a tapering body and tiny feet.

However inventive the pose, however lovely the models, the photographer seems to take the same picture over and over again. And the trouble is that it’s never a terribly good picture. I keep wondering how to tell them that they could easily improve their pictures. But I’m not sure that that actually is a way.

Now, I know perfectly well that my own pictures rely on a number of tried and tested setups, technical tricks, and types of processing. In a sense, the only differences are but I have several of these, and that I avoid the basic mistake of shooting everything from the same viewpoint.

I keep meaning to shoot an example or two, but it’s so ingrained in my mind to avoid doing that… Similarly, it’s thoroughly ingrained that I should avoid terribly even lighting on subjects and background, in the way that I see in so many of these shots. A couple of nice shadows on either side of the subject completes the picture, and it’s not a very pretty one.

So my suggestion for the day is to look at what you did in your last set of pictures, and see if there is something that you just do too often and without thinking.