My Very First Model Shooting: Carmen

Hey, I am a bloody beginner - as I already stated below - but it was quite a lot of fun to do this shooting with Carmen. On a Saturday we checked out the location and semi-accidentally found this beautiful canal around the Rheinhafen in Karlsruhe. The most intriguing reasons to shoot there were twofold: Firstly, there is a dark underground with a very nice atmosphere and there is this kind of ...err... riverweed that forms beautiful green strings in the water. The following Monday we spontaneously decided to do the shooting. I took tripod and flash umbrellas but it turned out to be useless. The tripod in this kind of shooting makes no sense at all as I was walking and jumping to and fro all the time. The umbrella stands did not make sense in most images due to the water surface which would reflect quite much of the light. On the other hand the polarizer did a really great job to filter out nasty reflections on the water. Unfortunately this place was quite dark and the lens was a 17-85mm EF IS something thing with apertures ranging from 4.0 to 5.6 which was quite slow for these images. In the end I had go up as high as 1600 ISO with the 20D which introduces quite some noise. However. So, technically this was a truly low-level-shooting but therefore quite challenging. Luckily, Carmen is a pro swimmer and she did not complain about her almost pink-blue lips for almost two hours (while I felt perfectly comfortable out of the water :D). What I like about the resulting photos is that they are quite diverse and that I had the luck to capture some really beautiful expressions of the model. I think this kind of shooting was perfect for a beginner, because there wasn't much hardware involved. I just concentrated on the images which we had planned very roughly before I sent her into the water. The post processing was mainly global. I played around with colours, saturations, contrast and stuff, but in most images I did not locally add adjustment layers or something. In a few images I clone-brushed away some annoying grass, but that's it. So even from this side, this was a beginner's task. Personally, I already received quite some good critics, I really hope you enjoy it, too!