Natural Lighting

The Story

Above is Alex Age 17 looking to make it in the modeling world. Alex saw my portfolio on a site called Model Mayhem before it was deleted and wanted to recapture an image I have shot prior. Alex and me setup a time where we were able to be in Baldwin Park area where the sun was behind the trees for the Sun’s glow. Alex enjoyed one tree and I Like the diffusion the light got as it past through the Tree’s leaves so we adjusted our photo for a soft glow to fill the shot. The day of the shoot was amazing, as all the things that needed to happen did no rain, very bright and lack of inhabitants in the area. I snapped a few shots to test the look of the light my Nikon D90’s LCD monitor and previewed them to Alex. With Alex’s approval we began the shoot starting with some simple directions, lower your left shoulder, look to the left, and lift on arm. I have worked with many models in my short career but none of this caliber she was a professional published in many magazine and ready to hit 18 next week to start a new phase of her modeling career. Alex was nice and charged me nothing for my service; it was a TFP Time for Print, which is a trade for photos for time. This was Alex first unpaid shoot in 3 years and I felt very proud since she like my service enough to find me.

The Photo

The photo its self is just a happy accident from an earlier photo from a past candid shoot with a buddy of mine. The light source was the sun shining on the back of my model, the sun it self is extremely bright and glared the lens of my Nikkor f/1.8, 50mm lens and I had to make the discoloring of this effect less visible. The photo was candid it had the feeling that the model was not posing in the original and this was very difficult to establish with Alex and it took several suggestion on both part to accomplish this feat.

Post

Adobe Raw “For The Win” helped me the most when correcting the glared discolor in the original and the new photo that is shown above. This was very simple barking the greenery and increasing the contrast in the discolored areas. On this photo I also was able to use the eyedropper tool to select sample of color around the discoloring to blend the odd colors our.

Conclusion

Every photo I take with a model I learn everyone is not the same and other learn with a different approach and with Alex help I learned new techniques and with trail and error I new how to correct the image I capture to the satisfaction of my self and the client.

One Light Masterpiece

Nikon D40, 50mm f1.8, 5-foot Octa-box on camera right, Models are facing camera to the left of light.

First I would like to say this is one of the rare photos I have taken of myself. Second do not tell my girlfriend that this photo is on my blog (she will most likely destroy any future life plans I have, and I enjoy life.) So strait to the back-story I bought these gas masks a few days prior to this photo for intentions of an idea I have for the future, and then there is the revolver which was used to scare some random people at my house that where not invited (prior to this moment me and my roommates decide theft or destruction to our property was not acceptable so... well you can guess what happen.) anyways guy left as we opened our back doors and then the story of the cowboy had is nothing we just happen to have one in the house. That’s is just the beginning, our friend David (I’ll say his first name is pretty generic) was assigned to come up with a black and white photo scavenger hunt and one was a couple photo. So this was an easy check off, the girlfriend plus some weird props and me equals an awesome outcome.

Not mention above this photo was shot outside so the lining in the background is a fence (that why it dark on the bottom on the photo and lighter as you look up the photo.) so Above this photo is originally shot in black and white with camera setting and away from my awesome Nikon D90 the down grade version, the D40 was the camera used with my 50mm lens. Disclaimer I am a strobist photographer (I use strobes and flashes off camera) and David was not allowed to use my primary lighting equipment so we used my 5-foot Octa-box, which is a continuous light (Dodged a bullet) with a 1000 watt light. So this photo is shot with a huge light with diffusion on camera right facing talent with a soft glow. The image was captured with 500 watt blub lowering thebrightness meaning we had to switched to a open aperture of F/1.8 to get the depth between the focus on the barrel and the out of focused mask.

Post is always the end of this blogs but due to the project that David had to do he was not allowed to edit it so once the class was over I got the jpeg image then cropped and vignette the image to make it a little more cinematic adding some contrast with the curve options in Photoshop. (Didn’t use raw since the image was captured in a fine Jpeg) thanks for listening to the jabber and please look out for my next post that the gas masks were actually bought for. (Depending on the model I may have to censor this image, doesn’t that sound promising)

Working WIth LIght

Nikon D90, 50mm f1.8, SB-600 on camera left, Model faces the light

Watching movies and surfing the net me and my roommate got bored (this happens often after playing popular first person shooters) also with the knowledge of our model friend was going to be here for some quick snaps we decided that we needed to try new poses and I needed to try new lighting set-ups. Spending just a couple minutes to get the ideas to pop and the few hours to go through all the poses and lighting set-ups we got this beauty.

Above you have a photo of my roommate (talent) this image was captured with a Nikon SB-600 at ½ power through foam cooler ($3 at your local gas station) to a wall back at my talent. My talent is facing the defused light, which is very soft now that it is reflected several times. In order to get the contract between my talent and the wall behind him is simple it just having your talent get far away from the wall as possible for completely back and closer if you would like the opposite effect. Now once these steps are completed we need to go in to post to get the color pops and the vignettes.

For post I always start in Adobe Raw, which allows me to use a raw media format that gives more, editing possibilities and is a much larger file type. First I crop the image then move and mess with my color correction and curves, after that I added the vignette and cranked the contrast to the level I prefer. Last in Adobe Raw I can alter the RBG so I dropped all color levels to 0 making it black and white (I did blue and green last that why I decided not to drop them) you can see here that the image has a blue/ green glow which was simple by moving the blue and the green levels to the adjusted levels you like. Next is the import to Photoshop to finish the post editing of this photo. First I saved the file to a .tif so I am able to import the file, then I sharpen the image and a few other basic items. Usually I add a watermark but at this time of capturing this photo I didn’t have a registered trademark.