Retrospection

I met a photographer friend a few days ago who I had not seen for sometime. He asked what type of photography I was doing now, and when I told him I was still doing model photography he was a little surprised, thinking I would be doing other genres by now. I’ve known him since when I first started model photography, and at the time I was still doing sport, landscapes, wildlife, still life, basically anything and everything, and he spoke of how much he admired all of my images. To be honest I am still as passionate and still get the same great pleasure from my photography, so can’t see the point of doing something different when I don’t have enough time to do all the model photography I want to anyway.

I’ve also been looking back through past images as I’m producing a number of books, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find images I really like that I haven’t edited before for various reasons. One of the books is of images of a location that I’ve been using one and off for over 8 years, and one of the most productive shoots there was around eight years ago with the lovely Ivory Flame. Holly did a couple of blog posts at that time with images in a window and also some on a floor, and while looking through them for images for the book I decided to do a few new edits, as I feel that my post-processing style has changed and my skill level has improved since then.

Here’s one of the original images, alongside the unprocessed version, as well as a bit of cloning I was obviously going through a period of trying out various filters. I now cringe a bit looking at the originals and much prefer the unprocessed versions, but fortunately it’s relatively easy to start again with the benefit of experience and do something different.

The images were some of my early ones using my technique of shooting from above, and without the hinderance of gravity Holly did a whole series of super poses. Here’s four of them from the time, and I did actually process the last one much less than the others, so maybe even then I was starting to change.

All of those shots are actually crops, as even then I was starting to do wider shots, but must have chickened out and cropped in to make the model larger. Looking through my images I can see I did a less processed wider version a few years ago, that I don’t think I’ve posted. You can also see the original with the wood burner that I have cloned out. You can also see that I was on a mezzanine to get extra height for my above shots.

So fast forward to the present day, and I now prefer the wider uncropped shots, with the wood burner in, and I also think they are also more suitable for the book. Here’s another original and then the full version of one of of the similar poses. It’s quite a dramatic difference, and it shows how much I have changed.

Holly did such an amazing job with her poses that it’s a shame not to show more of them, so here are some of them. They’ve only been processed in LightRoom, and when I have made the final selection for the book I will tweak them further in PhotoShop.

We also did some looking out through the window, such as this one, but while I like them I don’t think they are as strong.

I’m really pleased to have rediscovered these images, and brought them up to date, and it’s good to look back and see how you were then and how you have progressed. Many thanks to Holly for her super creativity.