The fourth and next to last round of the digital image competition was an open round with just one entry permitted. This image was from the RPS sponsored workshop lead by Jon Gray – Classic and Contemporary Dance workshop with Kate Byrne as the model.
Resting after rehearsal
Judge’s comments
Yes, portraits – it is only when you start getting into portraits that you realise just how [ deleted ] difficult it is to do properly and it is not an easy subject to do.
We have an attractive young lady here , who has obviously taken up a pose. Now I don’t know whether you’ve posed the model or whether she has just rested in that pose and you decided to take a picture.
There are a couple of things that are a little bit out of kilter with this portrait in my view: first of all we are looking up at the face so unfortunately we are getting a good view of her nostrils, now if only she had tipped her chin down it would have been fantastic. And the other thing is that this lady looks like an extremely fit lady and she has got some very angular bones and we can see the shoulder there is quite angular and for a female anyway I think not so attractive, . Would perhaps pulling her hair to the fore to the front of her shoulder made that difference and softened the image down?
It looks as though there are two light sources, you can see two highlights in the eyes, so that implies there are two light sources, there probably is one direct flash as we can see a distinct shadow in the background, nothing wrong with that really but it does tend to imply that the lighting was reasonably harsh
One of the good things about this image is that there is no clutter in the background , almost pure white so it does glare back at the camera a little bit, but there is no clutter, and the board or shelf that she is leaning on is fine ,not a problem really.
So I’m in two minds but I think this is just a 7.5 for now.
The score
There were 18 images in this projected digital round in Division 1.
‘Resting after rehearsal’ scored 7.5.
The original image
After cropping I used Lightroom to convert to black and white.
This is the feedback that I had from fellow Club members:
Not sure that head near top bothers me as the space below her hand kind of matches. However, I agree about the shadow – I would minimize that somewhat which would be easy to do. I would probably comment on the dark bits of her hair and wonder if there was some more detail that could be pulled out. Also there is a risk that a portrait oriented judge might comment on the facial skin blemishes.
If you choose a clever title that makes it clear this is not intended as a beauty shot but to show a dancer in the middle of practice, you might help the judge avoid that error.
After I had had feedback on my first version, I then lightened parts of Kate’s hair, made more space above her head and adjusted the blacks and shadows. But I clearly failed on the title.
Here are some of my images from the workshop.