Beautiful girl and some very nice shots, I would have preferred to see some variation in pose/expression. I don't care for the mouth out of focus either. But then, I'm not buying them so, who the heck cares. Hope she loves them.
I'm not someone who generally dislikes Sergio's work. But I really have to wonder about the constant use of tilt effects in his portraits.
The purpose of tilting the focal plane is to get better control over what is in focus. But I don't understand the choices being made here. In image #2, for example, without the tilt effect the subject's face and body would be in focus, and the entire back wall and parking lot would not. With the tilt effect, her face is in focus, her body is not, but half of the wall is -- and it is brighter than her face is.
My eye is drawn not to her face, but to the bright patch of stucco to her right (our left). Is that really what the photographer was trying to do? If so, why?
Some of the other shots are better in this regard, because the background in-focus area is not visible. But many are just as bad as #2.
The final shot represents what I consider straight out "abuse" of the tilt feature -- it looks almost like her head is a mural painted onto the brick wall. Utterly pointless, IMO.
Special effects can be put to good use when applied with care and in limited amounts. When use of the effect starts to be put ahead of the needs of the subject and the goal of the shoot, then that's a sure sign of a gimmick.
Like your treatment and contact with the subject in all of them, but your posing is kind of boring. I think hands-on-hips is pretty much the only thing Ive seen you do.
Her belly looks bigger than it is in number 1, in my experience a major no-no and she will hate it. After that, well exposed fun images, far too much repetition in pose.
Honestly, #5 is the only one with a variation, and that's the expression.
These shots are good individually, as others have said. The expression is good (great smile), the processing is great. The tilt-shift effect is wild sometimes, but it produces some nice effects.
All together as a series though, they all have the same standing head-on pose. I would have liked to see some variation in the poses and expressions.
photoman333 wrote:
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All together as a series though, they all have the same standing head-on pose. I would have liked to see some variation in the poses and expressions.
Jason
She's a high school kid, not a model...lots of different/good poses and or expressions are a lot to ask from regular (not models) folk. Most people know how to look good in a photo and stick with that expression.
Micky, yeah, thats kinda part of the photographers job. Posing and interaction is perhaps the biggest difference between amateur and professional photographers. It should be atleast.
