My Very First Couple Shooting :)

I recently had a nice shooting with two models, Epi and Renée who had asked me to take some nice gothic photos of them. Of course I could not withstand and we squeezed a shooting into my calendar at the most famous Rheinhafen in Karslruhe. It turned out to be a great idea. I tried to take both nice and "coooool" pictures of them; the latter are rather standard-type gothic photos I have been told. However: Mimicking the standard helps to learn a lot :)
We went to a nice location with a lot of broken concrete walls, adding some kind of "everything is lost"-atmosphere. Unfortunately, I had absolutely no idea which pictures to take - not even a starting point. So we were very spontaneuos - and shot what happened. This is not exactly what I like, because I'd rather prefer to have some kind of concept or topic, so next time (I hope) I will be more careful in creating some concept as I did it with Carmen in the water-shooting.
Technically, I used the two umbrellas mixed up with the ever-changing late afternoon daylight. This wasn't so easy as one of the main problems was that the wind constantly tried to pull over the umbrella stands. We had to invent some heavy construction made from debris in order to stabilize them, but then it was very difficult to move the stands around. Here, I definitely need at least one assistant, helping me out with that kind of truly annoying details. Furthermore, I think about a water-fillable weight construction to stabilize the stands. We'll see. Just not to speak about readjusting the flashes all the time during sunset.
For the postprocessing I played around a lot and I have already been criticized to overdo my job here. I am unsure whether I agree. In detail, I did two things: Firstly, I used this "glow"-effect in which I duplicated the image, blurred the new version and multiplicated it with the first one. This is quite nice but easy to overdo. I think I still like this effect, at least for this shooting. Secondly, I modified levels or contrast and brightness locally in many regions, especially at highlights and in the face. This is very difficult not to overdo and I always tried to keep the whole of the image in mind. The results look in my opinion quite nice - after readjusting a lot of adjustment layers with some days of temporal distance.
In the end there is this dirty old discussion whether one should modify photos at all. Here, I have a clear opinion: reality sucks. I do not at all care whether the image looks realistic in the end. For me, the highest priority lies in the atmosphere and the aesthetics of the result. I think the adjectives I would like to give this shooting are: a bit romantic, slightly melancholic, pictorial, slightly erotic and slightly cheesy. I like the results very much :) Thanks to the models, once again!