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RE: Portrait of a girl in a top hat
thank you for the tip. I'm doing more portraits in a few hours, and the model was asking me what I could do to make her skin look better. I will pay more attention to how soft the light is. One problem is that if I move the umbrella too close to make the light extra soft, then I don't get any shadows and I was trying to control those. I just have more experimenting that I need to do, I guess.
Another trick is to put the light as close to camera axis as possible. Clamshell lighting works pretty nice here.
But this reduces shadows too, and you lose definition of the face shape.
For me it is much easier to fix the skin in postproduction than to recover missing shadows ;-)
I know what you mean about recovering missing shadows. I honestly do not care much for doing these portrait type shots. I am doing them basically to sharpen my lighting skills for practice so when I do take pix that are important to me, I can make them as good as possible. I'm really into a lot of conceptual stuff. See Jo Ann Callis or Alva Bernadine for photographers that I really like.