Olivia Raw Portraits (Patreon)

A dear friend of mine, and Patreon :), made the suggestion that I should make more blog style posts, share some experiences and insights to how I do things. I certainly agree, it's a great idea and I really enjoy doing this here, feels right.

So if you guys have any suggestions let me know. And feel free to comment on any post as well.

That said, I decided to show you some RAW headshots of Olivia straight from Lightroom.

Here are my final two selections:

My selection criteria are not written in stone, depends of the mood I'm going for usually. Here, her expression was most important, why I ended up with those two. Of the bat, I wanted to choose two, with a tight shot for one of those two, if I could.

That said, if I missed focus the photo wouldn't have been a winner in that case. If you look closely, I missed the focus slightly here, focus is not tac sharp on the eye, more on the nose:

Full frame doesn't forgive, I was probably cowboy wide open here at 1.4 or 1.8, taken with the D700. The shallow depth of field here is why I miss full frame the most.

I ended up still choosing this one anyway, probably because it was the only photo shot that close.

I wanted to share this experiment also to compare and to look back to how I worked back then. Today I don't retouch that much anymore, it goes with the times, things are changing for the best, a lot can happen in 3 years let me tell you. I never really changed shapes, silhouettes or traits anyway. These days, I just retouch subtly here and there using healing/clone stamp, but nothing crazy at all. 

That said, we are not there yet, I still see extreme retouching every day, ads with skin smooth af and social media filters clearing out skin and changing facial features, unattainable beauty standards for every one every day.