Hi J.C.,

Here are my thoughts on the first set of photos.

Cheers, Hywel.

I like the overall look and feel a lot. It is very effective to start with the shot of the empty room and the drawer full of bondage gear and ropes, I think that sets the story nicely. The model is pretty and she does some good expressions in bondage, which is always the first thing I look for! 🙂 🙂 🙂 Add that to a nice storyline construction and we get the feeling we are looking at a girl coming to a hotel room for a sexy bondage experience. The bondage is fine although personally I’d hide a few trailing rope ends so she can’t get hold of them! So the essential elements are well sorted.

On the technical side, you’ve done a good job balancing the light levels inside and outside the room, which can be pretty tricky with such a bright sunlit day. Unfortunately, to achieve this you’ve had to stop the lens down a lot, which has resulted in everything outside the window being sharply in focus.

So in the shots of her tied in the chair with the window behind it is hard to keep our attention on her, because there is so much busy detail behind her. To counteract this, have a play with shooting with the lens much wider open (f/3.5 I think your lens will go to, whereas shot 139 for example was taken at f/6.5) and use a short shutter speed to compensate (which may be limited by the sync speed of the flash you are using but some cameras can sync to very short speeds with their dedicated flash units). Also turn the ISO down as low as it will go- I think the background would look less busy at f/3.5 and ISO 100 rather than f/6.5 and ISO 400.

Focus generally looks like it is worth paying attention to- both in terms of where the viewer’s eye will rest in the shot, and what parts of the shot should be in sharp focus. Usually, unless you’ve made the specific decision to focus elsewhere, you should make sure that the model’s eyes are sharp (the rule is the eye closest to the camera should be usually be sharp, if you’re shooting with very shallow depth of field). There’s a few shots where I think the camera’s autofocus may have chosen to focus on something a bit non-ideal eg shot 100 where her dress seems to be sharper than her eyes. We usually turn the camera to use just its central focus point, use that to focus on her eyes, then recompose the shot holding down the shutter button so the focus stays the same, then shooting.

The other thing that I noticed was a bit all over the place was the white balance, with her white dress looking very blue in some shots and quite green in others. Some of this will be colour casts from the scene outside, but I wonder if the camera was on auto white balance? We usually find it better to choose daylight balance because then it is the same from shot to shot. Ideally of course, shoot RAW and make the white balance decision when you are processing and can see the differences rather than baking this choice into the file “blind” when you shoot.

The shots which didn’t use flash have a bit of camera shake- not surprising as they were presumably hand held at 1/40th of a second. Here’s where it would have helped to have ISO 400 or even higher- there’s a trade off between noise softening the image and getting a sharp picture from a decent shutter speed. I try never to shoot slower than 1/200th of a second if I possibly can and will turn the ISO up to allow me to do this.

I think it is a very good beginning. The most important things – a nice setting, a pretty girl, the feeling that there is a story behind the pictures, decent bondage, and good expressions from the girl- were all in place. This first set of photos probably relied a lot on auto settings on the camera, at a guess? The main thing to do now is to improve the technical quality of each image- they are well composed and well thought out, just need to figure out a combination of lighting and camera settings to get each one as sharp as it should be and as well constructed to show what you want the viewer to take from the image as possible.

My main suggestion, as always, is to take the camera off auto and set everything manually. Make mistakes, see what shots look like at f/3.5 or f/11, 1/40th of a second or 1/200th, daylight white balance vs. playing with the shots as RAW in aperture afterwards, and generally get a feel for how you want your images to look and how to use the camera settings to achieve that!

Also decide if you are going to concentrate on available light, daylight only shots – in which case maybe consider buying a nice fast prime lens like a Canon 35 mm f/2 which will make shooting with no additional lighting rather easier- or whether you want to start constructing the look and the lighting, in which case investing in some studio flash units is probably more important than more glass. (Actually I’d advocate picking up a couple of fast primes in either case, personally I think the discipline of shooting with a fixed focal length lens, plus the superior optical quality, is very good for one’s photography. I’d get a 35mm f/2 and 50mm f/1.4 prime and learn the ins and outs of shooting with them sooner rather than later).

Cheers, Hywel.

To follow up on a couple of Lurker’s comments (thanks, Lurker!)

The choice of zoom vs. prime is obviously a personal one. A lot of people prefer the flexibility of zooms Kate prefers to shoot with a zoom, for example. Although she has to shoot with primes on the Hasselblad as I didn’t buy any zooms for it! 🙂 🙂 🙂

I prefer primes because invariably prime lenses are lighter, cheaper, open up wider to let more light in, and are higher quality optically than zooms. They are optimised for just a single focal length rather than compromised over many. I’ve always had a fetish for bitingly sharp detailed images and prime lenses deliver this better. We’re even shooting video with prime lenses these days. I’ve just never seen an image from a zoom, even a top-spec 16-35 mm L series Canon zoom, and had the same “wow” factor I get from a good prime.

Personally I think one gets better shots by moving around a lot, and prime lenses force you to move to compose, so actually this limitation is helpful for me.

You do need to swap lenses somewhat more often, but for studio use I find a “standard” lens (around 40-50 mm full frame equivalent, which is a 35 mm prime on your Canon) and a “portrait” lens (around 85 mm full frame equivalent, which is a 50 mm lens on your Canon) is all you need. As Lurker says if you go any wider you get distortion, not a good thing with models, and generally unless you have huge shooting spaces you can’t get meaningful compositions with a lens much longer than 85 mm.

However, it does depend a lot on your shooting style. If you go the studio flash route and can always stop down the lenses to f/8 or so where they perform best, the optical advantages of primes are reduced, and you are not paying for an expensive heavy f/1.something aperture you never use. If you shoot mostly in available light or love shallow depth of field, you’ll be craving an f/0.95 prime in no time!

And even I keep a couple of zooms around for when shooting conditions require it- I wouldn’t want to be changing lenses on a beach in the wind, for example. (This is one reason why I keep a Canon plus 24-70 mm zoom in the kit bag, especially on location trips. Also works as a backup video camera.)

Cheers, Hywel