Date Night with a Third Wheel (my Pentax 67)

[jeremycole]

Hello, all. 

Long time since I've been on the forum but have been inspired again since bringing my Nikon LS-8000 scanner back to life. I'd love to hear what you think of my latest effort.

My wife was kind enough to pose for this shot in the lounge area of a restaurant/bar we went to on our date night.  It was shot on Portra 400 and, if memory serves, at 2.8 on a 105mm lens. There was some noisy grain in the original scan. In dealing with that, I found my way toward this contrasty look and monkeyed around with the sharpness and luminance settings under "detail" in the Camera RAW filter (Photoshop).

I'm a bit of a self-taught hack in processing and am working on my cropping skills to maximize the impact of my images so I would love your thoughts on those areas as well as the basics of the photo. 

Many thanks in advance.

Jeremy

P.S. I'm not seeing the image in the preview so I hope this works. If not, I'll figure it out and try again!

[Bent Hjarbo]

Very interesting light contour on your wife, but the 2 white blobs/boxes in the corners are very distracting, crop or fill them to improve the picture.

[ColinM]

I like the results Jeremy, though without seeing the "original" I don't know what other PP options you had.

I admire anyone who worked with a 6x7. After years of 35mm Pentaxes, I finally owned a 6x7 for a few years in the 1980s. I never saw the improvement in quality I'd been yearning after, though at the time all my work was printed and the bigger negs and slides brought other challenges.

It would be good to see some more of your work, when you get a chance to scan some more.

[jeremycole]

Very interesting light contour on your wife, but the 2 white blobs/boxes in the corners are very distracting, crop or fill them to improve the picture.

Thank you for your critique, Bent.  I had a similar thought. I like seeing the source of the light but since it's so blown out it's basically a white cut out in the image.  I'll experiment with filling/cropping.

Best,

Jeremy

[jeremycole]

I like the results Jeremy, though without seeing the "original" I don't know what other PP options you had.

I admire anyone who worked with a 6x7. After years of 35mm Pentaxes, I finally owned a 6x7 for a few years in the 1980s. I never saw the improvement in quality I'd been yearning after, though at the time all my work was printed and the bigger negs and slides brought other challenges.

It would be good to see some more of your work, when you get a chance to scan some more.

Thank you, Colin.  Much appreciated.  The jpg I'm posting here looks a lot different than the final TIFF in terms of gradients in the shadows, and the jpg version of the original uncompressed TIFF scan is equally off due to compression but if you imagine the deep shadows here as noisy to the point of looking gray/black, you'd have the basic idea. I'm going to keep a roll of 800 around for contrasty stuff in the future. I think I was just asking too much of the 400 and denoising can only do so much.  I'll try to post some more scans here soon!

[Akira]

Hi, Jeremy, I really like the way you let the lighting to enhance the contour of the lady.  The blown-out parts on both sides of the top of the frame may be distracting, though.

[Erik Lund]

Lovely capture! I would definitely keep the crop! I really liked shooting the 6x7 Pentax
Very moody pp just fits the subject and setup.

[armando_m]

Great image, love the contour

[Tristin]

Thumbs up from me.  The contours, colors and light dynamics are pleasing.

[Hugh_3170]

Yes - definitely get rid of the two white blobs and the blue thing inder her chair.  The framing and moody look suits me.

Very interesting light contour on your wife, but the 2 white blobs/boxes in the corners are very distracting, crop or fill them to improve the picture.