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.