better?

Well it's darker but it hasn't changed the skin texture much if any but I didn't notice the problem of skin like sandpaper on my monitor as mentioned by another viewer. As to whether this is better, I can't make my mind up. Both are OK but on balance this may have more impact being darker. It catches the viewer's eye a little more.

pentaxuser

Its a tiny bit better and for the future have a look thad there are the bra's marks are gone bevor you take a pic. I see some marks on the right breast from the bra in german BH!

Hope it helps, Armin

Thank you pentaxuser and Armin for the comments.
regards,
jf

After having a look at these two pictures, then looking at the rest of your gallery, could the difference be the faster film being more grainy?

I like these, especially this darker one, one point though, the far left of the picture shows what looks like the bottom of her white shirt, if this was cropped out, I think it would be a nicer picture.

You are obviously working over time with this model, this is good. I myself always find the third session is really fruitful, both for the model and the photographer. The first session is a get to know exercise and the second usually is good, but the third and subsuquent sessions are really good.

Mick.

Mick,

Thank for taking the time to look and comment.

As far as film is concerned, even with HP5 I can barely see the grain on the easel with
a magnifier which makes it hard to focused properly! The print in on a semi-matte
surface and the old scanner I used had a hard time doing its job properly, so the scan
shows some artifacts that are not present on the print and I didn't not bother to
remove them. All I did was some dust off and levels ajustments.

For the crop I'll try your suggestion since I'm planning to reprint this one as soon as I can.

This model is a close friend of mine and we've done numerous shoots through the years
and even though she's not a 'professional model' per se, it's true that a sort of trust eventually is
established. For this one we together decided to do something I coined 'the cheese-cake session'.
It was a fun shoot but I was and still feel a bit nervous about it as the fine line between all the
cheese-cake you see out there and b&w glamour photo as I envisionned is a blurry one. Maybe
we went too far. I honestly don't know!
Sadly, I think our collaboration will be on hold for a while as she moved on the other side
of the planet to finish her studies...actually not far from where you live!

regards,
jf