SCN at Fairbridge: Old Weathered Bench Seat

As I noted in my previous post I sort of ‘discovered’ Fairbridge Tourist Village a couple of weekends ago when SCN took pity on me and agreed to let me take some pictures of her. The location I originally planned to use—the Whitby Coach House—ended up being a wash out but we then discovered Fairbridge Tourist Village a little further down the road. I had always know it was there, having zoomed past the sign post many many times, but I had never taken that much notice of it.

So in the next few posts, with SCN’s blessing, I am going to post a few of the pictures from the Fairbridge shoot—which has a sort of neat sound to it … “the Fairbridge shoot”.

Now although I have mentioned many times in my posts that I love taking pictures and have been doing it since I was about 15, what I might not have made clear is that, by and large, most of my serious picture taking has been of landscapes and nature, and lots of rustic old buildings and the like. Although I know a lot of the theory about photographing people (i.e., cute models), and have tried my hand at it on a number of occasions, I would only class myself as slightly above average when it comes to taking great pictures of people, and in particular, cute females.

I used to go to the Willeton Workshop Camera Club (who still exist and their Web site is here—I just looked it up on Google) and I remember a presentation there by a guest speaker on the three golden rules of “glamour photography”. He said there is nothing hard about taking awesome ‘glamour’ pictures, just:

1. Find an attractive model.
2. Find a good location.
3. Take great pictures.

Well 1 and 2 were taken care of but I seem to have most of my issues with number 3.

Anyway, here is my first offering. Please feel free to comment with loads of compliments both for the model and for the photographer.

In a recent article I read on digital photography the author suggest that something he found useful was to always find two key things with his photographs that he could have done better. Doing this makes them stick in your mind and then you tend to not do them the next time. Well in the case of this picture:

• I broke the “don’t have a busy or distracting background” rule. I find the bushes in the background busy and distracting.
• The sunlight is too harsh and I did not use enough fill-in flash (note her right leg is black in full shadow when it should show the blue jeans). Also the overly harsh bit of sunlight on her face and left shoulder. However I am shy about using too much fill-flash as the next thing that goes wrong is the picture gets that ‘washed out’ look.

Damn cute model but . . .

Oh! There is a third mistake I made and I should know better. I did not take RAW images. I only took JPGs. If I had taken RAW images I probably could have wound-back the blackness of her right leg and got the blue denim colour back—but you can’t do that once it is a JPG because that detail has gone forever.