Hi everyone
Yeah yeah I know it’s been a few weeks since my last blog post but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been busy – quite the opposite actually. So, let’s have a quick recap. Hmmm, you know what? There are a few images to talk about in this blog post so I recon I’m gonna give the summarization a miss… kinda.
The one thing that I do want to talk about is the new version of Adobe’s Photoshop – CS5. Otherwise known as the photographer’s right hand. Or left hand if you are a gifted left handed individual like me! Well my mum always told me I was gifted – that was a compliment she was giving me, right?
I’m waffling already. Geez. Photoshop CS4 was/is already pretty good. It was/is fast, clever and once you get the hang of it, relatively easy to do all manner of creative edits to your images. I have never really been a big fan of manipulating one’s images to the hilt, but I did appreciate what CS4 could do.
Enter stage left CS5. It installed no problems at all (of course, nice one Adobe) and once I opened this new version I spent the obligatory 15 minutes or so arranging my workspace and re-doing a few of my favorite keyboard shortcuts. Then I opened up a random image to have a little play. Wow. Gasps and giggles of wonderment ensued. Content-aware fill, superior HDR processing, automatic lens correction, down-right awesome RAW image processing, Bridge integration (which I have mixed feelings about), the list goes on. I could continue to go on about how cool this puppy is, but this blog is not a CS5 review.
The screenshot to the right shows how I have set-up the palettes on my workstation. Clearly, I have dual monitors. I only say that to accentuate how beneficial having two monitors on your desktop workstation can be. As the view shows, it allows me to have one screen just for the working space to manipulate the image while the second monitor has all of the palettes easily accessible, but out of the way. You really can pick-up big-ish LCD monitors really cheaply these days, but like all things related to our passion of photography, make sure you get the best ones that your budget will allow. Anyway I’m digressing once again. Can you tell that it’s already 2am and I’m having trouble staying on point?
So, to the images accompanying this blog post. I have for a while now been regularly buying fashion magazines. Oyster, Black, Karen, Lulu and Fallen are some of the titles I really like. No, I don’t get them for the free perfume samples; but rather for the photography. These are such a great resource for photographers. The images in these magazines are sublime and a great inspiration.
Anyway I had seen a couple of shoots where the models were out in the middle of nowhere and everything was bright and very colorful. Really over the top colorful. Saturation turned up to 11. Cool.
Serena once again was happy to fill the modeling shoes for me for this short notice shoot. I had spent the morning prior to the shoot scouting around for a suitable location or two and as it turned out we ended up in Cardup, which is just next door to Byford. I couldn’t find any public spaces but I did however manage to find a couple of big open paddocks with wide open gates and no-one or livestock in sight. That’ll do I thought.
The images in the magazine that I really liked all had flash filling in shadows and bringing the background right down, almost as though the models were superimposed into a fake background. So I set out to replicate that look. I think I got it. I also wanted to try and play around a bit with natural light too, you know, to get two different sets of images that were polar opposites apart. One set with deep blue skies, bright green grass and lots of contrast on the model from the flash that I would bathe on her. The other set of images would have washed out skies and really shallow depth of field, but still the accentuated colors that I was going for.
It was a little bit windy that afternoon so that kind of killed any hopes I had of bringing out my enormous parabolic umbrella, as I was doing the shoot on my own and even the sandbags I have would not have held it down. So it was beauty dish to the rescue again.
Ok, the image at the top of the blog is a bit of a favorite image from the afternoon. I like the composition and the way the clouds are not directly behind Serena’s head. The sun was actually coming in over my left shoulder which was creating some weird shadows on Serena’s face. But not to worry, I just made sure that I over-powered the sun with the beauty dish. In fact, if my memory serves me correctly the ambient light was reading about 1/250th second shutter speed @ f/8, ISO100. So I dialed in the beauty dish at 1/250th second shutter speed @ f/16, ISO100. That’s two full stops of colorful goodness higher than the ambient. Cool. I love the blue of the sky in this one.
The next image was from the second location that we chose for the afternoon. I liked the way that the two parallel fence lines had a bit of a converging lines “runway” feel about them. So the D700 was set to about the same shutter speed and aperture as the first image. You may have noticed that the sky is a lot paler in this image. Remember how I said that the sun was over my shoulder for the last image? Well this time we were facing the other direction and looking right into the sun which in turn means that it is not nearly as deep blue as the last image. But, there is always a but, the advantage of this of course is that now we have a wonderful rim-light on Serena.
There’s another lesson to be had there actually. Don’t forget that my Bowens powered beauty dish is putting out four times (two f-stops) as much light as the ambient light falling on Serena. Yet you can still clearly see the accent or rim light falling on Serena’s right shoulder and across her chest. Now of course it all comes down to “artistic interpretation” and how much rim light you wish to place on your subject. But it doesn’t take all that much light to create a nice effect huh.
Ok it’s now obscenely late so I need to wrap this up quickly. At the risk of stating the obvious, the last three images are all taken using only the natural ambient light. I actually was using one of my Fujifilm S5 Pro D-SLR camera bodies and my Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lens for these shots. All of the images are taken with the camera locked in manual mode, f/1.8 and the shutter speed was set to over-expose the scene by at least one f-stop. I had also set the in-camera processing to Fuji’s cool F2 mode, or in other words, the Fuji-chrome or slide film setting.
The first two images in the blog had the saturation pumped up a reasonable amount to make them pop, but for these natural light images I have hardly touched the saturation in post production at all – what you are seeing is coming pretty much right from the camera. Sure they look a bit muted in the thumbnail size that they are on this page, but click on them and you will see what I mean. I also love how soft the images are because I was shooting at f/1.8. It’s such a contrast to the top two images. Cool stuff. I hope you like the shots. I really do.
Well that’s it for me. Oh, for those of you who are wondering what happened to Sandy, fret not. She too has been a busy little puppy and has been out and about taking some great shots lately. You can have a look here at her Facebook Album, and then look here at another album. Nice work Sandy! Hopefully for our next blog post she will be back in the swing of things and making a contribution once again to the blog. Can’t wait.
Ok everyone, take care and keep shooting what you love. Bye for now.
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