Jade - Railway Museum of Eastern Ontario

[Manfred M]

The first model I shot at this location was Jade. This is her standing at the back end of a caboose, leaning on the hand brake.

[Rufus]

You have presented a very relaxed and natural model.

It believe it is said that one should be careful where to cut hands and limbs in portraits, and I suspect the "norm" would be to avoid the fingers through the wheel; but I think it works well, adding to the relaxed feel and giving precedence and continuity to the wheel rather than foreground hand.

To be totally pernickety, the skirt edge seems far sharper than edges elsewhere for some reason and the side seam is apparent due to a mismatch in the stripes. Less obvious is the dart on the front where the stripes are bound not to match.

I like the contrast of colours between the subject and the location.

[Manfred M]

Part of the issue with location shoots, especially the first time at a location is trying to figure out the best way to go about getting some good images.

This shoot was one the photo club I belong to organized, so we do take turns and shoot in groups (this time we had 11 shooters and 3 models). We were there in the late afternoon and just after a fairly significant rainfall had passed through the area, so the sun was in and out (mostly out) of the clouds. The light was decent, but starting to fall off and the wind was gusting occasionally so I didn't want to bring out the large flash on the light stand. I don't do enough natural light portraiture, so I wanted to practice it.

With respect to cutting off bits and pieces of fingers, I find that the way I shot this works just fine as there are no "gaps" that the viewer has to interpret. The fingers and hand relationship are there. Where we often get an issue is when the cut of pieces are out of frame. From a sharpness standpoint, I do a single point focus on the eyes, so the dress is close enough to that frame to be extremely sharp. Is the rest sharp enough? I think so, otherwise I wouldn't have posted this image.

While this was a different model, it was the same location and shooting position. The shot of Jade was taken using a 200mm focal length at f/6.3, 1/400th sec at ISO 800 at around 6:15 PM. My shooting position was exactly where the photographer is standing on the caboose.

[Rufus]

I am envious of the sharpness of your images, and was not intending to suggest that the one of Jade was not sharp, far from it, simply that the one edge seemed extremely well defined, but it may also be my perception because of the striking contrast with the red.

From the second image I can see that the location you chose for the first shot provided good evening light as elsewhere in the vicinity there is lot of shadow.