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.
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!
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.
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!