Robert

[Chataignier]

[Shadowman]

Nice shot.

[bje07]

Good lights management and DoF

[DanK]

This is a really nice portrait, IMHO. My one suggestion is that the lighting is a little bright in some spots. I would burn a few areas to tone them down. Here is a sloppy example:

[rpcrowe]

Nice portrait - it shows a lot of character. Looking at it, I feel that I know Robert. I agree with Dan's PP...

[lovelife65]

Love this. He shows a lot of character in his face and expression, and I suspect he is a kind soul with some great stories to tell.

[Urbanflyer]

Great portrait. +1 to Dan's suggestion

[Manfred M]

As others have said, strong image, David. The lack of reflection from his glasses is extremely well done.

The nice thing about shooting more mature men is that we tend to preserve creases, folds and other facial features that we would tend to retouch in women. We can also get away with harder, more dramatic lighting, but have to remember that hard light tends to introduce more specular highlights and reflections that need to be "calmed" down.

When shooting in the studio, we tend to shoot at f/8 - f/11 as there is no need to throw the background out of focus and having a subject that is sharp from front to back is usually desirable.

One area that we do tend to soften, even for male subjects is to soften shadows under the eyes. We tend to avoid having "bags below the eyes" in all portraits. I did a tiny bit of healing and cloning, but most of what I did was dodging and burning to shape the face and control the highlights and shadows. I did open up the catch light on the camera left eye a bit too. I debated cloning out some of the stray hair and in the end I did so as they were drawing a bit to much attention.

High end retouchers tend do spend a lot of time dodging and burning on close up images of the face.





What you might want to do is to click on the image to open it in Lightbox and then use the arrow keys to move forward and backward to see how the retouches that Dan and I did compare to your original.

[DanK]

I'd pay more attention to Manfred's edit than to mine. He went beyond what I did. There were some hot spots that couldn't be dealt with adequately by burning, but I didn't go on to do healing and cloning to take care of them.