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Originally Posted by ratfugel
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Profilers seem to avoid this situation, preferring to stick to the harder variety. Still on the subject of shadowing, professional photographers, incidentally, much prefer overall illumination rather than direct hard edged light.
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As I get paid to take my pictures I might as well call myself a professional photographer 
I don't care about what light I have as long as I have some form of light. I shoot from a tripod anyway when it comes to non-action, use a mirror lock up mode, a remote trigger and when applicable use High Dynamic Ranging where I can get the maximum of data onto the image. If there is too much light on a bright day you can change its effect using your aperture setting or screw on a filter (though they are not meant for that they do the trick).
The 3D effect in profiles is a trick-of-the-mind like those images where they put two images besides each other and when you cross your eyes it suddenly becomes 3D. For this to work the best you need sharp easily visible shadows. Drawing planes like its overcast only makes your work look flat. Exaggerated shadows make the drawing "pop". It's better to over do shading then to under do it 
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Whilst I am about it, I might as well make mention of another factor missed by most lay people.
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I am now speaking about the type of cameras in most use, particularly in aircraft photography. All relatively small hand-held camera lenses suffer from ‘barrelling’ to some extent when relatively close to the subject. The better lenses (and here I am talking about my own ‘L’ type Canon lenses) work better somewhat further away from say, an aircraft in flight. Simply because the resolving power of the lens is so much higher,the image actually becomes flatter and so any shadows present are more accurately rendered.
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This is not entirely true, it is more down to things like the focal length of the lenses used to take the images, when shooting at anything beyond 150 mm (roughly) you remove almost all of the perspective and all focal points become orthogonal. A lot of people who use images taken within this boundary to draw profiles forget this and end up with oversized noses and tails plus anything sticking towards the camera gets oversized too. That's the reason I shoot images I used to determine shape and size of an object compared to the entire airframe at 400mm from quite far away on a tripod. I always arrange to photograph my subjects on the flight line too if at all possible. The effect is sometimes called image orthoganility (Translating a term from dutch here so might not be the correct english term)
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This is why the walk-arounds one sees are usually quite poor from a photographic point of view, being useful only because they show up details, usually in an ‘overflash’ situation. (Flash from small cameras falls off in intensity very rapidly indeed). My own feelings about profile shadows is that they should at least LOOK real, shading off just as much as necessary and no more.
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rat.
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Compact camera's should only be used to shoot pictures of women, pets and children. I don't know if you did but you should check out some of the walkarounds I posted in the old gallery (we are working on a new one). No over flashed, blurry or poorly lit pictures there
Most people need to put some time into how their camera works before they post stuff online. I see stuff posted on forums that makes me cringe. Stuff I would delete from the memory card without even viewing them on the PC. The digital age has made photography shareable for people from all skilllevels, which has been a mixed blessing.
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