First off, I recenently changed my name from Ware3927 to shmee
Woohoow! A new personal best and a fifth place! The funny thing is that now all of my top four entries are black and white...and I've only entered 8 out of 31 entries in black and white. Hm...maybe I should start doing more black and white shots!
Thanks everyone for the constructive comments!
Anyway, the setup:
Black bed sheet as the background and one flood light on each side for side lighting. I messed around with the position to get the best muscle definition.
The man on the bike is my boyfriend :) He has very little body fat and huge leg muscles. He was very self conscious about doing this, and especially about seeing the finished product.
I agree with many of the comments about the cropping. I do like the photo without the head and hands cropped off better, but thought this crop still worked pretty well without ruining the shot. The photo is about the body, not the person. I tried cropping all of the head off, but then it was just this floating body with no head...it was really wierd to me. I think we're all just used to seeing the full head, and it seems odd to see a photo with part of the head cropped off.
Post processing: Very little.
RAW conversion in Photoshop, desaturate, curves, a tiny bit of neat image to get rid of the grain in the background, and sharpen.
Statistics
Place: 5 out of 91 Avg (all users): 6.6023 Avg (commenters): 7.4231 Avg (participants): 6.2162 Avg (non-participants): 6.6652 Views since voting: 8109 Views during voting: 708 Votes: 264 Comments: 30 Favorites: 2 (view)
I gave this one a high score. Really says "fitness" to me. The b&w is very well done (so often it just seems like a ploy to rescue a bad photo, but not in this case).
Good picture, the fact that his half face and hands are out of the composition somehow attracts me. The only thing that I don't like is the shadow of the arm on the breast. 8
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