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.