what a difference a year makes....

[doctahjones]

i think i saw a thread about this before, but i'm too lazy to go search for it.

basically i looked back at my first posts on here, and found my first "studio" shoot at studio arlington. wow. what a difference a year makes. i'm not saying i'm all that (and a bag of chips), but i'd like to think i'm tons better than back then.

feel free to add your own shots to this thread...

so i go from doing shots like this (dec '08):




to shots like this (nov '09)

[lyncca]

I've been wanting to do a thread like this for people to display images when they started and current. The only reason I haven't is because my old images are all on a seperate drive. I'll go dig it up and post some.

[ChristopherCoy]

Brad already has a thread started like this somewhere.

James,
Do you think you've learned more on the lighting side, or more on the processing side? Or a combo of both? Or do you think its because you have more, and better equipment than you did a year ago? What do you attribute your development to most?

[doctahjones]

Originally Posted by ChristopherCoy

Brad already has a thread started like this somewhere.

James,
Do you think you've learned more on the lighting side, or more on the processing side? Or a combo of both? Or do you think its because you have more, and better equipment than you did a year ago? What do you attribute your development to most?

all of the above!

i've learned -tons- on post processing, but i honestly probably only know about 20% of what you can do in photoshop.

i've learned tons in lighting, on both flash and monolight. i also know that you don't -have- to have a bunch of equipment to do portrait type stuff. in those i posted, the first one i had 2 flashes, and the second one was with only one monolight if i remember correctly. the catch light shows two lights, but that should be the strobe (smaller catch) and the ceiling (larger catch)i bounced it off of.

for what gave me the biggest leap in overall straight off the camera image quality, i'd attribute that to the tracy hicks/greg woodson glamour workshop i took last may. that gave me the clarity i was looking for in the pictures i was trying, and gave me insight into getting lights under control via camera settings and the distance, power and light modifiers (or lack of).

for what gave me the biggest leap in post processing techniques, it was a combination of here, playing around with PS myself, and youtube.

for equipment i feel that you can get more types of looks with more lights, but the number of lights doesn't change the image quality itself.

[Brains]

I started a similar one recently as well ;) Maybe it deserves a sticky?