What make him so good???

[Lisard]

Hi everyone! Every time I look at Dave Feiling's photos I want to put my camera in the bag, zip it and never touch it again. I am not ashamed to say that I have been trying to copy him all the time. He is my guru and inspiration. What's so special about him? Is it a perfect combination of color on each photo? (how on the Earth all his model wear clothes that match the background???) Why his photos look like beautiful paintings? Why they're so sharp? What kind a software he is using? I can't belive you can produce something that beautiful without photo editing software! I want to know the secret so i can be 10% as good as he is. What do you think? What equipment he's usung? These questions keep bothering me and I turn green from the envy (a positive kind of envy though:) every time I see his new work.
Here is his website:
http://www.onemodelplace.com/member.cfm/P_ID/3407
What do you think guys?

[cecilc]

He is my guru and inspiration.

I can see why .... those are just superb shots.

This is just my opinion, but I don't see a lot of "photoshopping" in those photos. What I do see in all of those shots is:
1) Control of lighting
2) Control of DOF
3) Superior technique (in other words, he knows exactly what he's doing!)

I mean, in a couple of those shots, you can tell that he's GOT to be using a reflector to get some light where it should be ....

Hey, he's just good .....

[snibbetsj]

Light control and composition, it's that easy. Do it right and little PSing is necessary.

Merry Christmas :)

[Barb42]

Beautiful models help a lot, :) !! He obviously knows what he is doing, but as I tell the young hopefuls in my camera club - its much easier to take a good shot of a pretty girl than of anyone else. The trick is to learn how to make the not so beautiful look good. Get your technique down and just go for it. I'll bet the man took thousands of photos that were so-so before he got to this point.

[ppuga]

I think the same as the others, he has great pictures, but nothing extraordinary I think that makes you never touch your camera again, jeje.
Knowing your camera and how to control almost everything as you like, I think you can get to those results, and of course you need a good casting, great models, excellent wardrobe, lots of equipment and time with all this stuff to get to this photos. And a good client of course who is paying for all that stuff. He is an Advertising Photographer, he has budget to have the perfect location, models, as the client wants to.

And I think here you can learn a lot with the help of others, in the few days I have here in the forum I've learned a lot, reading, asking and of course shooting.

;)

[IndyJeff]

If I had to guess I would say that preperation is what seperates this guy from his competitors. Back in 89, I was painting for a living. I had a job painting the above wallface where signs had been removed from a couple of storefronts at a shopping center and the old paint had faded, still showing the outline of the old signs.
At the same time there was a photographer from Chicago who had come down to take pictures for the center to be used in advertising. I watched as this guy stood back and looked at these store fronts. Elbow on arm, hand on chin studying what he was going to shoot. He then looked thru the camera, changed the location of the camera and then looked again. In the 40 minutes it took me to paint a wallface that was about 5 stores down, this guy took one picture and stood back and looked some more. The head maintenence guy said they were paying $10,000 for this guy to do this job.
I never saw the final results but, I did talk with the maintenence guy about 6 months later. Come to find out, this guy was watching the changing of the light as the sun moved across the sky. He came back the next morning and did another hours worth of work. This time he was moving from postion to position pretty quickly getting different angles while the sun was what he considered to be just right. The maint. guy said he shot nearly 150 pictures in that hour and they chose 2 that they would use for the ads.
Seems the first day was just about getting an idea of what the final product would look like, in his mind and on film. The second day was the actual shoot.

Now for the life of me I couldn't see why this guy did so much studying of a building front. Of course he knew and that is why he was making $10,000 in two days and I was making $300 for 3 hours.

Preperation on any photography job is about studying what your shooting and looking at it, as much as it is the actual shooting, maybe even more.

[sGu]

He's got some good shots, but nothing stands out to make me go "wow".

Jeff said it, preperation is the key, if you spend an hour to set up for one shot, you'll find it much better than any of hundreds of shots you take within 5 mins.

[GPR1]

Many people have indicated preparation is important, and they're right. Equally important is practice. His brief bio indicates he's been shooting professionally for over 20 years. That's a lot of practice. So keep practicing.

Greg

[Lisard]

Well, looks I am the only one who thinks that he is genius :)
Somehow even in the "Showcase gallery" on OMP among hundreds of images his work stands out. I always can spot his photos from many thumbnails.
Preparation maybe a key, but just want to share something I discovered: this guy does a lot of work in Photoshop. Actually where is more then just simple levels/color/contrast etc. manipulation.
I took several his photos and zoomed them in. He is not only a photographer - he is an artist. He outlines the parts of image he wants to "stand out". It's a lot of work and probably he spents several hours for each photo but I think the results worth it. You may notice a line between the background and a model - it makes the image so unreal sharp. I tried to use sharpening software, but to achive such an incredible result you need a lot of manual work. He outlines the eyes, lips, some parts of the body. You can barely see it on the web but I am sure it would be noticable on the large prints. On his cover "Marry Christmas" image you can easily see the black line between the white hat and brown brick wall.
So there is a little more than preparation and lighting.
My next purchase probably would be a laptop with touch screen monitor and a pen so I can try to implement this technique. It's hard to do something like this with a mouse, I think.

[PacAce]

Well, looks I am the only one who thinks that he is genius :)
Somehow even in the "Showcase gallery" on OMP among hundreds of images his work stands out. I always can spot his photos from many thumbnails.
Preparation maybe a key, but just want to share something I discovered: this guy does a lot of work in Photoshop. Actually where is more then just simple levels/color/contrast etc. manipulation.
I took several his photos and zoomed them in. He is not only a photographer - he is an artist. He outlines the parts of image he wants to "stand out". It's a lot of work and probably he spents several hours for each photo but I think the results worth it. You may notice a line between the background and a model - it makes the image so unreal sharp. I tried to use sharpening software, but to achive such an incredible result you need a lot of manual work. He outlines the eyes, lips, some parts of the body. You can barely see it on the web but I am sure it would be noticable on the large prints. On his cover "Marry Christmas" image you can easily see the black line between the white hat and brown brick wall.
So there is a little more than preparation and lighting.
My next purchase probably would be a laptop with touch screen monitor and a pen so I can try to implement this technique. It's hard to do something like this with a mouse, I think.

Yes, I agree, this guys does some very good work. What I noticed (from the pictures in the website you provide) is that he uses almost flat lighting, either from fill flash or the use of reflectors or both. But his subjects are never directly in the sun. They're usually in the shadows and then artificially illuminated. This makes for some pleasing lighting. When out in the open directly under the sun, he positions the subjects so that the sun is always behind the subject or to one side but still slightly behind the subject, then uses fill flash or reflectors to get the subject out of the "dark".

As for the Christmas picture, he selected the model so that he could put her in front of the snow flakes and also blur the background a little. But when you select a subject where there is a huge contrast difference between the subject and the background, such as the hat and the dark brick wall or the coat and the light stone wall, it's really hard to separate one from the other due to the gradual feathering of the color. What he did was to paint over the gradual feathering to make the selection less obvious or should I say, less noticeable. If all he had wanted to do was to just place the snow flakes between the model and the background, the edge paiting would have been unnecessary.

[cecilc]

On his cover "Marry Christmas" image you can easily see the black line between the white hat and brown brick wall.

That's not a very good example to prove that he uses photoshop to "alter" or "enhance" his photography ....
That image is NOT just a photograph. it's become an illustration .....

[sparker1]

I agree this guy is good, obviously because he uses a lot of good technique learned over the years. I don't see that his work is any better than that of many other studio photographers. I admire his skill, but there are thousands (millions?) of photographers that do it better than I do.

[Divyak]

A few things that stick out about his images:

Great use of depth of field
No harsh lighting, probably achieved with a large scrim
Perfect focus
Angles he has arms and legs posed at (an arm or leg is almost always over exaggerated)

I agree Lisard, his work is superb

My OMP Profile http://www.onemodelplace.com/member.cfm/P_ID/2602