Critique New nifty 50 and a low key selfie NEW EDIT ADDED

GerryS

GerryS

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I picked up a nice little f1.8 50mm Nikkor at the weekend so had a play last night at getting a low key look, I was quite pleased for a first attempt. I ended up at f4 as at f1.8 it was just still too bight to get the look I wanted even at 100 iso. I've some NDs on order so that will solve that when they come and I can try again at 1.8. In the mean time c&c welcome.....

EDIT.... It seems to have gone darker having been put into Photobucket, the original on my screen isn't quite so dark....

Gritty%2050%20crop_zpsqinjexpa.jpg
 
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I like the way the light has caught your eye. Possibly a touch dark for my tastes but as you say that seems to be a Photobucket issue.
 
I like it. The DoF at 1.8 might be too shallow anyway - I like the way it's in focus from the nose to the ear.
 
Thanks, the good thing about the neutral expression was I could repeat it while moving my head backwards about 3" at a time to get the optimum focus!
 
Rigu said:
I like the way the light has caught your eye. Possibly a touch dark for my tastes but as you say that seems to be a Photobucket issue.
Click to expand...
Thank you! I'm guessing it's something to do with the way they compress stuff?
 
Now this is only just my limited-experienced opinion in low key, but I think a common mistake with trying to produce these low key portraits is that there is a misunderstanding of what it actually means. The idea is not to produce an under-exposed dark image, but to be very selective in where you're lighting, bringing up your contrast in a primarily dark lighting environment.

No disrespect, but to me, this looks like an under-exposed image with not a lot of lighting control. But then, as was said above, this may be because of photobucket and I may be talking a load of hogwash. :)

All meant in a constructive manner. :)
 
I got bored trying to optimise for Photobucket so I've joined Flicker instead! Slightly tighter crop and I've cloned out the edge of the T-Shirt from the bottom right which was irritating me....

16969764910
 
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Thank you so much! The Photobucket way is a tad easier, just a shame it doesn't work very well for the images!

flicker by slade.gerry, on Flickr
 
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GerryS said:
Thank you so much! The Photobucket way is a tad easier, just a shame it doesn't work very well for the images!
Click to expand...

You're welcome. Flickr has its own foibles, of course, one of which is that it adds a small amount of sharpening to your images. This isn't normally a problem but if you're uploading a scanned negative that you've worked hard to get to what you feel is optimum sharpness, it can overdo the results and leave you scratching your head over what went wrong. :thinking:
 
It does doesn't it?! I managed to inadvertently delete the image above which was a shame as it was a direct comparison with the original post, the same image but on different hosts.
 
GerryS said:
I picked up a nice little f1.8 50mm Nikkor at the weekend so had a play last night at getting a low key look, I was quite pleased for a first attempt. I ended up at f4 as at f1.8 it was just still too bight to get the look I wanted even at 100 iso. I've some NDs on order so that will solve that when they come and I can try again at 1.8. In the mean time c&c welcome.....

EDIT.... It seems to have gone darker having been put into Photobucket, the original on my screen isn't quite so dark....

Gritty%2050%20crop_zpsqinjexpa.jpg
Click to expand...

3 by mrcrow_uk, on Flickr

yes you have lost it there...it just looks underexposed
some fiddling could get the eye back and throw some contrast in...??
 
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