Light. Shoot. Edit.

Keeping It Simple

2013-05-03T11:42:00.000-05:00

Final Image - Keeping it simple

I forgot how long it had been since I had written new articles (aside from my recent spurt), wow, it has been a while, and WOW my old images suck!

Staring at the blog and trying to think of which images to cover next made me realize my style/taste has changed a TON in just a year. Many of my older images (and those covered by earlier articles), are just awful to me now. Sure, I learned some valuable lessons from those that hopefully I have passed along, but many of them I no longer have a fondness for. Be that as it may, I will leave them up as the lessons are still worthy, even if I now hate the resulting composition.

In any event, as I look at my library, there are a few time-worn images that offer-up a worthy lesson (and also don't suck as much). This one is a solid example from 2011 with less suck, and less... everything.

Today is a lesson in simplicity. Keeping images simple yet interesting is a balance I often try and achieve when shooting certain styles, and in this case, a focus on fashion. Now, I have shot fashion on location and some awesome places add a lot to the image, but when you want the focus on the dress, it often works out better in a more generic environment than in a busy one. If you are constructing art, then the opposite may be true, but it all depends on your style as well as what the picky ass client might want (right or wrong). In this case we are striving for simple yet artistic, and I want to find that fine line between the two. A blank wall is unacceptable as well as not a differentiator (more on that later), so we want to find the middle ground between interesting art and a blank wall.

Posing The Model

I prefer poses for fashion where the model isn't looking at the camera. You also want to find the aspects of the outfit that are the "star of the show", and feature those. In this case, I like the shoulder details as well as the bun-hugging abilities offered by this fabric. It was then a simple matter of finding a pose featuring those aspects as well as her not looking at the camera. Now, those are not rules, just my preference. I have shot fashion where the model is engaged with the viewer, but it isn't often my preference. Keep in mind when you do shoots to have the model look at the camera as well as away from it, so you have options later. I used to regret not getting a specific shot, but learning the hard way sucked and now I get a variety. Look at me, look down your body-line (especially when shooting lingerie), look at that light stand, look at the floor, etc. Keep it in a rotation so you get some of each from the unique poses. When you do this, also keep an eye on the catchlights (pun intended) so the eyes get some sparkle if they will be seen in the final image.

Lighting The Scene

Thrilling Lighting Diagram

In this thrilling lighting diagram we see we have three total lights with which to fiddle. In reality, this is a simplistic way to light most scenes and is a great default when you are in doubt and in a panic state in front of a client. In a spectacular fail in labeling my lights here, I would like to start with C, our Key Light. It is the workhorse for the majority of the photons we are throwing at the model and is gridded for no particular reason. I think I had it on there from a previous session, and there was no reason to remove it. Normally we would have a grid on here to prevent the background from getting hit, but because of the angle here, the light would hit it regardless of the grid.

Both A and B play the same role, but from different sides of the scene. Their goal is to "sculpt" the model with light and help all of the 2 dimensional mediums (print, screen, whatever) appear to be more 3D. Without these lights, the scene is pretty flat and boring, boring, boring. Adding rim lights is a great way to add some zing. If you don't have rim lights consider using a reflector to bounce some light back in, or use the sun! I rarely use the sun as a key light, as it makes some wickedly sharp shadow unless you diffuse it with something. But as a rim light, it is ready to go, but you might need to increase your shutter speed to get it to a reasonable level of brightness.

Post Production In Photoshop

There is very little in the way of post production here, which I guess is the point of the article. However, what we do add takes it to a different level of image.

As a photographer, it is what makes your work unique that helps you get noticed and hopefully hired. Had I left her on the gray background, I think I would be in the same ballpark with hundreds of other people who have a white wall. But, by making a mask and adding in this hand-painted texture, as well as a minor tone adjustment, I have taken this image to another level. The question is, how many other photographers would have even bothered?

When tackling some of these images in post production, think of what you can do to make your work stand-out from the crowd, and not take the lazy road. However, also keep in mind you also have to make yourself equal before you make yourself unique. If your lighting is awful, no amount of Photoshop will save you.

Demonic Dagger

2013-04-11T15:12:00.002-05:00

You know all those rules of posing you are supposed to follow? Like, don't shoot women with their hips straight at the camera, keep all the weight on one leg, and don't talk to strangers with demon like eyes? Well you can feel free to break those once you understand why they are in place, (have an abundance of holy water at hand for the last one).

Posing The Model

In this case, I wanted a strong and confrontational pose and with the hips to the side (normally done to reduce the width across the pelvis), the photo loses a lot of its might. So I just skipped over that guideline and went for the punch rather than concerns about child bearing hip width. Sure, some models might shed a tear or two, but Jane here can handle it.

A term you should get to know is "canoeing", where the bottom white of the eye is showing (makes a canoe shape connecting both sides of the sclera). Originally I didn't much care for this image, as the eyes bothered me for the aforementioned reason, and it only recently dawned on me that I could just paint over the eyes and rescue this photo from the unloved lifetime of my messed-up photo archive.

Lighting the Photo

thrilling lighting diagram

Lighting this image is simple enough with one large softbox, camera left. It is almost directly to the side of the model, and you can tell this by looking at the lighting on the face. The far side of her cheek is getting just a tiny kiss of light, where the rest is dark, so this is pretty much a split light.

The "glow" evident on her far shoulder is from the glare off of the white wall. No reflector was used here as it would have bounced to much light back onto her side, and I wanted the drama. Note that this softbox is gridded to prevent a ton of light from hitting the wall. Controlling the spill from light modifiers is something I find myself doing on every image, as I don't want the background to distract from my subject. If I want to light the background, I will typically do this with another strobe or two rather than use the spill from the key light.

Post Production In Photoshop

Much of the creepiness of this image is derived from the modified eyes. To create this effect I simply used the pen tool and outlined her eyes, and then filled that selection with black. I then took a white hard-ish brush and painted in where the catchlights ought to be. I just used what was in her real eye as a point of departure here. Also, if this effect is to sharp you will find that using a gaussian blur on that layer will help with the believability. I kept the catchlights on a different layer from the black sclera until I had the eyes the way I wanted them. I then merged them down to a single layer so I could work with the whole image.

I did end up using Liquify a bit to square her hips a slight amount, but otherwise she is pretty much untouched. Once I had her shape finalized I used the quick selection tool to separate her from the background so I could add a texture and the glyph. I played with the blending mode and transparency until I was happy with the result. There are two textures applied here as well as the glyph, for a total of three additional layers. Each has a different blending mode to augment what the previous layer brings to the table.

To help with the punch of the image, I created a 50% gray layer set to the Overlay blending mode. On this I used a 2% white soft brush to add more highlights to parts of her body. This increased the drama of the image, and I then used a black brush to do the opposite in the shadows. Some of you may recognize this as the old method of doing a Dodge & Burn, as the original image layer is unmodified and I can just paint in 50% gray to fix any mistakes. I do this step on all of my images to some degree. This method was needed prior to Photoshop CS3, when the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop should have been named "make more brown", as they sucked at the only job they had. I still prefer the Overlay method because it is non-destructive and quite simple to fix mistakes, not that I make any of course. :-)

One final touch to this image was a solid color "light blue-green" adjustment layer added over the entire photo. I reduced this to around 2%, and it helps bring the blackest parts of the image into gamut and adds a "softness" to the feeling of the shot. I find this effect pleasing and use it on a lot of my low-key images, and it amazes me what this subtle little step can do for the work. This also helps a ton when you get work printed, as the blackest parts of the image are no longer pure black. Another fun alternative to this is to use images of "light leaks" from older cameras. These are all over the web and make some interesting effects vs the solid color I used here.

Any questions on things I might have missed? Thanks a ton of the feedback on the last image gang, was nice to know people are listening!

Waiting to Prey

2013-03-18T13:21:00.000-05:00

Final Image

Well it has been over a year, I finally decided to write a few more articles and see how this goes. I was getting a lot of readers (I think), but very few comments, so I gave up. If you are one of those readers and like this blog, take 30 seconds and leave a comment, as I spend hours on each article and need to know it is worth it. So, don't just be a drive-by reader, show me a bit of love. :-)

Green Bay Fear

Each autumn I get a chance to travel to Green Bay, Wisconsin to a large car-show/haunted house event. This annual photographers smorgasbord is put on by Green Bay Fear, who show us all a great time and put on a wonderful event. Most of the time I avoid the automobiles, as they are parked right-on-top of each other and the event is packed with people who have a knack for photo bombing. I find it hard to get a decent shot without some elderly guy strolling through my shot eating a brat, so I tend to work in the haunted house, which is more my style anyway.

Lighting The Image

When I am in Green Bay I always tend to use my Nikon speedlights rather than shlep all of my Einstein strobes along with me. Aside from being lazy I often don't have the space to setup large strobes with their even larger stands. Tiny speedlights on small stands tend to work better in confined spaces, who knew?

Normally I tend to avoid the exterior places around the haunted house, as it is typically cold outside this time of year, and I don't much care for the sun wrecking my lighting plans. However, this past year we have some surprise time limits for each interior space, and that put a significant cramp in my style and mood. On my first shoot for the day, I had just finished setting up my lights when I was told that it was time for me to move on to the next room. as the space was scheduled for a different shooter every 30 minutes (would have been nice to know ahead of time). I decided at that point the sun and I would have to come to an agreement for the day. I was not going to get along with this arrangement where I only had 30 minutes to be an artist in each interior space.

The model and I then wandered around the creepy sets they have planned outside of the building. I would like to point out that I get to see this place during the day, and I am sure it is quite gripping at night, especially once you add all those actors that jump out and scare the patrons.

This little outbuilding we finally found nestled in the rear of the property had some great character and a lovely bench for us to use. The sun was on the other side of the building, so it was providing some ambient, and that was about it. I didn't want my poor speedlight to have to complete with that bad-boy.

On the speedlight I had a 12"x8" Lumiquest III softbox. I have discussed these in the past, and they are great little modifiers, as they are small and collapse easily to fit into my tiny speedlight bag. I placed this on a small light stand and put it camera left (A in the diagram), just out of the frame. I wanted to keep this light as close to the model as possible so the fall-off is significant. Remember, the closer the light is to the subject, the faster the light will fall-off in intensity. Moreover, the closer the light, the softer the shadows will be, simply because the apparent size of the source will be larger because it is closer. Now, she is young so her skin can take a harsher light source, so this diminutive softbox won't be her enemy. I won't be shooting a grandma with this tiny modifier unless I want to really show off all those wrinkles (probably not good for repeat business).

Camera Settings & Lens Choice

Shutter Speed: 125th
Focal Length: 36mm at ƒ4
ISO 100

For this shot, I used my 24-70mm ƒ2.8 lens which normally lives in the bottom of my bag and seldom sees the light of day. I don't prefer this lens because of the distortion, but in this case the look lends itself to a more dramatic image. I normally don't like to shoot portraits with anything less than 85mm, but then again you have to be open minded when you are looking for something out-of-the-ordinary. Try shooting a few portraits of the same person using a shorter focal length, and then with a longer one, and see what the differences are and what you prefer. Note that you will have to move much closer to the subject with a wider lens, but that is why this starts to become problematic. But hey, go ahead and give this a try, you might find your preference is different from mine (though I doubt it :-).

Posing The Model

This young woman is an accomplished model, so no real direction was needed. I just worked with her and got her into an ominous mood (call it a gift). Giving the model a character to play makes posing much easier, and because her make-up lends itself to a specific genera, the rest was quite easy. Note that getting low to the ground (laying on it actually), was critical to making this shot interesting. We have some great texture on the ground, and the wide angle lens will really make the perspective pop. Yes, I got dirty, but I lived.

Post Production in Lightroom 4 & Photoshop CS6

The image straight out of the camera

The image straight out of the camera wasn't a bad one. It had good lighting (critical, 'cause you can't fix this later), and I liked the pose with the legs all akimbo. The problems I had with the image were that the textures on the building were not as obvious as I would have liked them. There was also WAY to much red in this image for me, and specifically in her skin tone. With her solid tan, and the make-up people loving their flake blood supply, I needed to desaturate things a bit. If you follow my work at all, you will notice that I tend to prefer muted colors, so get used to me saying things like "there is way to much color in this image".

In Lightroom I took a moment to bring up the lighting in the shadows just a bit, as I wanted to be sure I had no clipping there. I wanted to have data in the darkest places if possible, as I want to be sure all of the textures will print well later on. I also removed a bit of the Vibrance from the image, but left the Saturation as it was. The Saturation control in Lightroom is much more of a hammer than I needed for this specific job. Vibrance tends to remove colors based on how prevalent they are in the image, so brighter colors are the first to die, which is exactly what I wanted here.

In Photoshop I added some Curve adjustment layers and created the brighter and more contrasty spots on the building. I masked this effect so that it was only in the areas I preferred, and didn't brighten the entire image. I don't tend to add a lens vignette to images but that same method of focusing the viewers attention can be done by manipulating elements in the image, such as this. I did this by creating some curve adjustment layers and made things a LOT more contrasty and pushed this effect into the sides and corners of the image. Again, I prefer this to be a more organic feeling vignette than the typical oval which I find over used by most photographers. I have a strong opinion here, but then again you could probably guess that by now. To add a bit more drama to this image, I took a very small round brush and added some additional wisps of hair to her bangs. There were some already blowing in the light breeze that day, but I really wanted this to add more to the image than was originally present.

After I was finished with things like retouching skin and any other little things I couldn't do in Lightroom, I headed back to application for some final touches. I added a bit of a split tone, as I like a bit of blue in my shadows and I wanted to remove a bit more of that color in her skin. I also added a bit of clarity to the building and foreground. A word of caution here; don't apply clarity to female skin, it looks awful, and also don't use the negative clarity, that sucks even more and has a very obvious look one can spot from a mile away. I have seen attempts at skin smoothing using this sorry method, and I would tell you to avoid it as there are much better methods that don't suck. Again, my strong opinion showing here where I see a lot of new photographers getting sucked into the ease of use and not the awful things it does to their images.

I don't sharpen my images, as I leave that for Lightroom to do based on the target medium.

Want to see more articles? Tell me that this was worth my time, and don't just be someone that reads and never comments. ;-)

-sed

Making Friends The Hard Way

2011-03-31T10:18:00.000-05:00

Being a fan of the unusual often wins me the chance to take photos that no one else would probably approach. Around the end of last year we had a body painting extravaganza and one of the suggested themes was the Frankenstein type of stitched-together person.

Out of the camera this image is pretty decent, but it really lacks depth and storytelling, as as it is now it makes for a somewhat disturbing glamor shot.

Lighting The Image
This image was lit by two lights:

A 22" beauty dish with a 30 degree grid on it. This was positioned directly over her face.

A strip softbox with a cloth grid was camera left and a little behind her. This is the "boob" light as it will cast the desirable shadow in the cleavage as well as add a rim light to help her be more three dimensional.

The goal of the grids is to keep the background from being overly illuminated and control fall-off of the light. I much prefer to shoot on a gray background than on white because of the "splash" of light that bounces back onto the model from a white sweep. Because I often composite my images with others, that annoying splash can make the transition quite noticeable.

The image was shot at ƒ5.6, 250th at ISO 200, which is very typical for much of my studio work. The recycle time on my lights at ƒ5.6 is very quick and the depth of field is plenty deep to keep the model in focus. I shoot my Nikkor 70-200mm ƒ2.8 for most of my work. I LOVE this lens because it is super sharp and allows me to work from a distance to keep distortion to a minimum as well as shoot on a relatively small background because of perspective compression. I can explain that in depth if there are those that don't understand what I mean by all that gibberish. Ask questions in comments and I can address them.

For those interested I use Paul C. Buff Einstein's for my studio lights and modifiers. Occasionally there will be a rogue Norman or a Speedlight in there as we have some around the studio, but since I much prefer the Einsteins.

Posing The Model
As far as the story should go, we have a woman that has been sewn together from the parts of others. Having her be cheery and happy would be out of character. The sad and forlorn look is much more in character. Also, we need to sexy this lady up a bit, so I dropped the shoulder straps to show off her chest and paint job therein. Not much more to say here as the pose will work with the story we need to complete. I do have a ton of other shots from this brief session that are awesome, but the pose here really made it work over the others. I prefer this one because she was not looking at the camera. I find that engaging the camera is often nice, but just as often I don't desire this. I suggest you balance your session and be sure to get some of each as you will kick yourself if what you really needed you didn't bother to shoot.

Note that I made sure to show off as much of the body-painters work as possible as they will probably want this for their portfolio. Always keep in mind the make-up, hair, wardrobe, etc and the needs they have when you are shooting. I often shoot closeups of make-up just to be sure those people can walk away with something at the end of the day. I find it rude when someone is only shooting full body shots of a model and isn't concerned about the fact the details added by make-up will be to small to be appreciated.

Post Production In Photoshop
Well, we have quite a bit of work to do, so lets get to it.

First thing we need to do is to correct any issues with the model. This might include liquification of arms, abs and so on. Kristen does not have any issues there, so we can skip by this step. I did adjust her hair position a bit but not much. While we are focused on the model, take this time to fix any complexion issues weird wrinkles and so on. One of the main things I use liquify on is armpits. The folds of skin there can often lead to the dreaded "armpit vagina", so posing is important or you will have to deal with it later. Liquify allows you to fix that area, but it is a ton of work.

The next thing I needed was a room that worked with the lighting I used during the shoot. I was able to find this shot of a hospital bed on the web. Please note that if you use images they either need to be under the Creative Common's License or ones you have purchased or have permission to use. Don't go stealing work, as I am sure you will be upset if someone did the same to you.

The photo of the room had some wacky light thing hanging from the ceiling, so I had to clone that out (using the aptly named clone stamp) and correct some of the drapes over the windows. Once I had the background working I created a mask of Kristen so I could drop her into the image. I use a lot of tools for extraction, but I don't use the Photoshop extraction tool as it makes me want to throw things. I much prefer the masking tools and the new "refine edge" commands in CS5.

Now that I have the model in place over the background I make a copy of Kristen so I don't screw her up. I then proceed to dodge and burn her image to match the lighting. A great example here is the stool in the shot. It should not be illuminated if the light from the window is to be believed. Using the burn tools I darken this until it looks proper and believable. It does not need to be perfect, as this is art dammit :-) Note that I also used the dodge and burn tools above and below a few of the stitches on her body. I did this because I figured the skin tones of the people used to assemble her would be unique. I decided not to go overboard on this so it is subtle, but I feel it helps sell the idea and story. In the end I also added shading around the perimeter of the room to bring the focus to the middle. This is known as a "vignette" and is actually undesirable in the optical world, but it can help with focusing the eye in specific areas of the scene.

My final step is to get the colors of the two images to be somewhat similar. At this time I also decided on the final tone of the image and greenish was the winner. I selected it because of the somber feeling and almost sickly/solemn feeling it might give to the viewer. Using a curves layer I adjusted the colors of both images independently until they were close. I then added an adjustment layer of "photo filter" or whatever it is called (looks like a little camera). That was used to add a tone to the entire image and resolve any minor differences that might have been present after my tone curves.

For the final touch I added a hue/saturation adjustment layer and dropped the saturation of the entire image. The happy red of her dress needed to be not-so-damn-happy.

As always a "Like" s much appreciated using the Facebook button at the top of this page. Comment if you have questions or just want to say "hi" :-)

Said The Spider To The Fly

2011-03-06T18:02:00.000-06:00

We have some very unique places to shoot in our studio, being that it is a nearly 100 year old abandoned factory. One of those places is an old tool-crib. For those of you that don't know, a tool crib is where factory employees can beg for expensive tools at a service window in order to do their job properly. The goal of the crib is accountability for that costly saw and its expected return when the worker is done hacking things in half.

However, all this tool crib has to offer these days is a plethora of spiderwebs! Yup, and along with those webs come a ton of the little creepy workers as well. In some places they are so thick they are almost opaque. I guess that is what you get with 20 or so years of letting them run the place.

We do rent the studio if you are ever in the Milwaukee/Racine area, please let me know and we can make some arrangements for you to test your arachnophobia.

Posing The Model
The model today is actually one of the hair dressers I had with me, but because all of the models were making squeeling noises, she volunteered to be in the shot.

Basically I was looking for something that really worked the creepy factor. Lots of poses come to mind, and I am sure I will get in more shots of this space in the future. I was actually there this weekend, but we decided to play in an old power room filled with valves and forgo this for a day when the model isn't making high-pitched noises at the thought of entering the room.

This pose was a "come here" type of pose. Because she had on a little-girl type of dress, we went with it reminiscent of something one might see in The Shining. I would like to note that this room is HUGE, in there are probably 8 halls like the one in the image, so I am not really doing the space any favors with this tight crop, but then the space is holding the subject, not the other way around.

Lighting The Scene
In this case, I used a ƒ2.8 24-70mm lens (racked out to 70mm) and mounted this on a tripod. The overhead lights were plenty bright and the "raccoon" under the eyes we normally try and avoid is making my neck-hairs stand on end, so we went with it and didn't add anything else. Yes, the model had to stand damn still, but I think the exposure was around 1/30, so very attainable without pushing ISO up very far (I avoid that at all costs).

Post Production & Photoshop
OK, now is where the fun begins.

The initial image isn't bad, and that is always the goal of course. If you can shoot it, do so. Don't use the "well, I will just fix that in Photoshop" excuse if you don't have to. No one likes additional work later when you can take a moment and fix it at the point it is taken.

My first issue is always color balance and I am looking for something on the *old* side, so yellow it will be. Adding a huge adjustment layer we can mess with this color as often as we feel the need as we continue to develop this creepy visage.

The model didnt' really have any cosmetic issues, and from this distance if she did they would not be readily visible anyway. We can pretty much blow past that and get onto the lighting.

The image is under exposed as far as I am concerned. The center point of the image is of course our pretty lady and we really need to get her up to snuff. The easiest and most non-destructive method to fix this to do this is a curve adjustment layer set to the screen blending mode. I could have increased the ISO to get the proper exposure, but I also would have done damage to the exposed areas where now I have more control. In the end the image will be textured anyway, but at least I can make decisions about what I want blow out.
This curve-screen method is my favorite because it does not increase the image size as much as a copy of the layer set to screen. Plus we also get the benefit of the curve in case we want to adjust the overall adjustment.

Once that layer is in place I might go in and mask out areas that are overly bright. Remember a mask can be added to about any layer and is automatically put in place for adjustment layers. Just paint black on the mask and it will block out the effect from that area. You can also paint shades of gray if you only want a partial effect as well. In this case I had a 20% black brush and painted on the mask over areas to remove the effect (darken), and in some cases I would go over an area several times.

Next I wanted to add a texture to add some age as well as another level of detail. Again, if you don't already own The Fly Paper Textures, just go get them now. I can't tell you how often I use these, and many of my future images also utilize one or multiple images from this awesome set.

I choose one of the textures from the set and set it to overlay blending mode. I then used the mask on that layer to remove the texture from areas like the models face. I also took the dodge and burn brushes and proceeded to bring out more of the concrete texture on the floor. The area behind the model was also lightened to "bring her forward" and increase the contrast and focus for the overall image.

Questions, comments, witticisms, criticizes, heresies, or fallacies? Please leave me a comment.

Inverted With Pearls

2011-03-04T10:36:00.000-06:00

I don't often do glamor shoots, but I do find they are a lot easier than most of the things I attempt and they do keep one sharp on some of the basics of lighting and retouching. In fact, from a lighting perspective they are often very challenging as one as to take extra time to "sculpt" the model with the light because they are always self conscious about something. That in itself cracks me up, as these beautiful women always think their boobs are too small, too large, lopsided, whatever. Of course this has quite the level of entertainment value, but also gives you a lot of clues on how they should be lit and for that you really need to pay attention.

Posing The Model

In this shot I wanted something a little more interesting then her just standing there looking pretty. So, I had her leaning backwards over a stool. I thought this did nice things to the hair and also gives us a unique view across the chest. The pearls were added to give you something to look at .

Lighting The Model
There are a lot of books that go into great detail on how to light people. Basically you have to hide the stuff they don't like in shadow or by using their own body to obscure the view, while you simultaniously highlight the things they do like. One of my favorite rules is, "keep the rack away from the key light". Meaning, don't point the chest at the key light or it will flatten the chest. You want shadows there, and you are not going to get them if you have the light heading right at them. Rim lights do a wonderful job in the chest area as they can help highlight or shadow depending on the pose. This is a huge mistake I see from beginner photographers, as they are trying to light everything evenly and you don't want that!

OK, so now that we have that rant out of the way I wanted to use Rembrandt style of lighting on her face for this shot. You can tell it is Rembrandt (modified loop), by the triangle of light under her eye camera right. I used three softboxes on this shot, one on the right for a rim light, one of the left for a rim, and the key was just outside of the frame camera left. The rim lights are barely on, and I could have shot this with one light quite easily, but I already had them in place for another scene so I just used them since they were there.

Powerful Yet Dangerous

I take the time to ask the model what they are self conscious about, but I also take into consideration what I think is attractive and find a balance. Justine here doesn't have any issues of which I am aware (and I did ask). She is just a happy and attractive young woman and is open to all my strange ideas in the hopes of becoming a professional model someday.

However, a word needs to be said here on the power the photographer has to really screw up in a big way, and I don't mean from a photo perspective.

People all have feelings, and you don't know all the specifics going on in their heads. They might be near the brink of a break-down and the last thing they need is a shot that makes the look fat, flat-chested, or fugly. If they get shots from you that deflate them personally you can really wreck someone's day, or even worse be the straw that broke the camel's back. I read an awful article a few years ago about a woman that turned to modeling to help her gain self confidence as she was in a personal slump. The photographer was a "friend" that had a camera, and he sold her on the idea of taking some images to show her how attractive she was. In the end her shots were so bad they affirmed what she was already feeling. Of course she became even more depressed and nearly committed suicide.

I realize that story is pretty awful, but it does illustrate an important point in that your images are not just your best attempt to make a model look good, as their might be more at stake they you realize. In this case the photographer could have also had the opposite effect and really made her feel good about herself.

Photographers have a HUGE effect on the self confidence of the model!

Take time to talk to the model about what they want from the shoot and where they might feel they have issues you want to downplay with pose, light, and shadow. I would rather tell the model all the photos were destroyed than deliver any image that makes them look poor, and then offer to re-shoot at my expense.

If you are just getting started working with models take time to work with an experienced model as they already know how to pose themselves and can actually help you quite a bit. I know I learned a lot early on while working with some experienced folks, and this was a lot smarter move that I realized at the time.

Sorry for the depressing subject there, but I felt the need to toss it in here as it is important and is something you might never have considered. But consider it or not, it is still there.

Photoshop & Post Production
Post production here is basically retouching the skin using the healing brush and dodge and burn tools. I should point out that I prefer the older version of the healing brush where you need to designate the source area. I prefer this control to the new one that makes a pretty good guess 80% of the time.
Dodge and Burn were used to even skin tones in areas but they also don't remove or alter the texture.

Once I had the image where I wanted it, I added a few lens blurs to the image to put more of the focus on the face and finally sharpened the eyes for the final touch.

Total time to finish the image was around 30 minutes.

Somebody Call A Nurse?

2011-02-15T21:19:00.000-06:00

One of the last shots from my Halloween adventure I wish to share with you is this happy-go-lucky nurse in a lovely new hospital portrait. I am not really very happy with this image for several reasons but I am sharing it because it does demonstrate how flexible an image really is and why you should save EVERYTHING. I never (and never is a long time) delete images in the field based on the camera preview, even the blurry ones. There are often times when an image might be used in an unconventional way, like the bridge image in my last post, so just keep it all as hard drive space and CD/DVD media is cheap.

As mentioned in several other articles I was in Green Bay, WI and shooting at a haunted house. The models were all dressed up and scary/pretty for the event and this one (Angela) was no different. I was working with her in some other shots (which I will post below) but when I first saw her I was outside on a break sitting next to some big blue metal buildings. I loved her make-up and lovely look and asked her to pose in a way that breaks about every rule they tell you in photography (straight shoulders, straight-on look, chin down to canoe the eyes, etc) and I didn't even care about the distracting background. I snapped this single image and made arrangements to work with her later in the day.

Lighting the Model

I used a single light source with no modifier. The light was positioned 149,597,887.5km from the model. It was also warming the planet and providing gravity, but those are secondary to shooting of course. The shadow was provided by this huge blue building that also gifted us with a lovely blue cast to her right side.

Posing the Model
Like I mentioned before. This photo is pretty much a list of things NOT to do when shooting people, but for creepy factory, it works pretty damn well.

Post Processing in Photoshop
Alrighty, so there was a *tiny* bit of Photoshop involved here. First thing we need to tackle was what in the world to do with this image. I had the hallway creep into my mind and proceeded to locate a suitable image from those available under a creative commons license on the Internets. I found several I liked, but this one was ideal for the image I ultimately wanted. Note that I had the other choices on other levels I toggled on and off as I worked just in case I wanted to change my mind.

First thing I did was to remove her from the background using all the tricks I know. It wasn't too hard but a few problems remained, like the blue cast from the building on the right as well as the lighting was not a match for the background (or any background for that matter). I should mention that when extracting I don't rely on any after market plug-ins, and the Photoshop extract tool is as annoying as country music. I tend to use a lot of the pen tool as well as the background eraser for most of the things I extract. Remember you are not sending someone to the moon here, so you don't have to be perfect about it unless it is for a client and even then if you can't tell it isn't perfect then who will know (I promise I won't tell).

I am tossing in another image I did the Angela to the right here because it was from the same day and probably not worth you reading my rambling in a separate article. It was lit by two SB800 Nikon speedlights and I applied an effect to make it look like it was an image on an old black and white television. OK, back to the show...

To remove the blue cast we just use a hue adjustment layer or curve and remove the blue from the image until we are happy with it. If we feel we need blue in other areas you can use the mask that is created with the layer to lessen or eliminate the adjustment. Remember the mask isn't just black and white, you can partially remove an adjustment as well with a brush set to a partial opacity.

Obviously our biggest challenge is the fact this image isn't lit at all like our creepy hallway background. So I placed the model over the top of the background and pondered which of the 782 method for re-lighting the image I would choose this time. The winner was what I call the "Overlay dodge and burn" method of punishment.

Note that this method was the weapon of choice until CS3 when the dodge and burn tools became useful. Before CS3 they were very annoying and were so bad they were probably banned from use on prisoners in some countries.

Basically you need to understand what the overlay blending mode is and how it works to grasp how this messed up method can be used. The Overlay blending mode does nothing when applied to a 50% gray color. If it encounters a color lighter than gray it will brighten and you can already guess what is does if the color is darker than 50%. So, to use this method we create a new layer and fill it with 50% gray (that is an option under the layer fill menu or shift-backspace for you keyboard short-cut freaks, of which I count myself a proud memeber). Once we have the new shiny 50% gray layer, we put it over the model layer and set it to overlay blend mode. BOOM! Nothing will look any different, but now we can begin the magical process of re-lighting the image. I started with a black brush at 10% opacity and started to darken the right side of the image by painting onto the 50% gray layer. I work from the the outside-in fucusing in sculpting the model as if this was a shadow cast by a real light source on the right. Pay attention to anatomy, and if you don't know anatomy then get your spouse, mate, plaything, playboy, whatever and use it as a reference. Just keep going over the image with the brush and watch the darkness come into the image.

This process took a good 30 minutes just to re-light her and once it was done I decided to drop her opacity and give it a ghostly appearance. After looking at this image that I worked on months ago while writing this, I feel I should have done the opacity treatment differently and used "Render Clouds" on the mask to give her a less uniform apparation, but overall it works just fine as it is. I always say that I will go back and revist it later, but I know I am just fooling myself :-)

Need Not Be Present To Win

2011-01-31T08:20:00.000-06:00

When I am inspired by something it often isn't in the ideal environment. A great example is my complete lack of a full-sized starship and futuristic laser weaponry. I just can't find a battle cruiser at a reasonable price, so one often has to improvise.

On this day I was inspired by this vinyl dress that Kristen brought to the shoot, as it seemed almost futuristic in many ways, but again I was fresh out of amazing places to shoot it. However, we do have Photoshop, and often you can use common things to get an unexpected outcome.

Posing the Model
I was looking for something elegant and stern. I think she hit it just fine. That is all.

Lighting the Portrait
I was using three lights for this shot. A typical large softbox (gridded) and a strip softbox (also gridded) and off to camera left. I gridded them so they would not spill light onto the background as I had devious plans for said white roll of seamless paper. I put up an additional light, but rather than trying to light the entire background evenly I used a barn-door modifier and was looking for a kind of beam "woosh!" type of light. You might remember this type of background lighting idea from a science fiction post I wrote last year using a similar modifier (you can see it in the camera shot near the bottom of that article). The idea here is that whatever we plan to do with the background, it will probably look pretty sweet with a little variation. The original photo out of the camera is pretty decent, but not quite where I want it.

Post Production in Photoshop
The first thing I normally fix is anything wrong with the skin of the model. Luckily there wasn't anything major, so this was a quick step. Next I wanted to put the model into a futuristic setting, but I also didn't want anything obvious. So, a bit of "implied detail" is going to work well here. Sometimes attempting to create a photo realistic setting just isn't going to look good, so we can go with something abstract and let the viewer decide where this shot was taken.

I created some burst patterns with the pen tool and added white fill to them as well as distorted, stretched, duplicated, and otherwise abused them. This transformation extravaganza combined with blending modes created a pretty abstract lens-flare type of effect while completely avoiding the use of the oft overused filter of the same name.

However, the background still wasn't what is could be because the background was still this gray paper with a bit of interesting light; it needed something else. So, I searched around for some stock photography and found a shot of a bridge. I cropped just the structure under it which was composed of beams and other metal thingies. By placing this under the new light patterns I had created, we now had something interesting! The bridge layer was desaturated and tinted a light blue to add some color hints. I also rotated it to the point it was almost upside-down, but I liked the ways the lines were working and moved around the light layers I had drawn until they both worked together. I sharpened the dress to help make it a bit more glossy and called it done. Total time to complete is around 20 minutes.

Sum of All Fears

2011-01-29T11:10:00.000-06:00

Sometimes an idea just pops into your head that makes you think you should probably seek medical attention, and today we look at one of those images.

Seth here was asking to do some sort of shoot with me, and I wanted to work with him on something in this last hour Halloween bash. His make-up was an inspiration for this idea, and all we needed was a cup of fake blood, which was not difficult to obtain.

Posing The Model
Sharon was my victim of choice here and we spotted a nice area of green grass directly next to a parking lot. In fact the pavement is so close to his left knee, it was in a few of the other shots. The premise here was simple, create an image that an raise those little hairs on the back of your neck by making something so surreal and yet *possible* as to concern the viewer. I had Seth put some of the fake blood in his mouth and when he did his *hiss of death* it would come running out.

Lighting The Scene
Because it is pretty much dusk at this point in the day, had complete control over the light and didn't have to argue with the sun with my tiny speedlights. I probably could have used 2 flashes for more light volume, but I also think the mood required some nightfall to add to the creepy factor.

I used two Nikon SB-800 speedlights on this one triggered by my SB-900 using the magical Nikon CLS system. The key light was placed camera right on a stand about standing height beside me. The light it would throw on Sharon needed to be one that went into her eyes, so the "thousand mile gaze" would feign the look of death. The gaze can be accomplished simply by looking through the photographer and not at them directly. I think she was focusing on one of the drunk people watching us the parking lot behind me. In this case I also felt we needed to pull the models out of the darkness with more than just a key light, so I put a bare SB-800 on a stand behind and to camera left of Seth. I put a blue gel over it thinking that this was probably moon light if the scene was to be realistic. There would not be light there for random reasons, so making it a moon in post would be simple enough.

Post Production In Photoshop

Post production on this image was not terribly complex but more is involved here than initially meets the eyes. As you can see his face is underexposed, and I think this is mostly because the batteries were about done playing with me for the day and I didn't have any more spares. I hate doing it, but in this case I needed to increase the exposure in post, so I added curve adjustment layer set to screen mode. This is more efficient than making a copy of the image and then setting it to screen, plus you get the added bonus of a curve you can fiddle with if the mood strikes you. Of course I did fiddle with it a tad, but not to much as I didn't want anything wacky here.

I also had to fix some of the missing white make-up so the skin tone with be less obvious. Using the clone stamp tool, this was pretty easy to correct in a few minutes.

Next I decided to handle the moon issue. This was super simple as I just tossed in a circle with a neutral gray (with a few splotches of darker values), added a Gaussian blur and then set it to screen as well. That handled the color cast and it looks real enough for this image. Photo realism is not required all of the time, and learning when you don't need it can save a lot of frustration and wasted time. I could have used a stock image of the moon, but the blur would have made that a useless purchase, and the blur was really needed for the mood in my humble opinion.

For Seth I needed to add a little more creepy factor, so I lowered his jaw to an unreasonble span by using the Liquify command. I also added another curve with a black mask and went in and painted in a few of the highlights (white on the mask) to be sure the blood streams were obvious.

In the end I am quite pleased with the shock factor of the image and the overall mood.

As always comments are appreciated.

Light At The End of The Tunnel

2011-01-24T11:28:00.000-06:00

Ok, after taking a long break from this blog because I figured no one was reading it, I am back to toss out a few new articles and see how it goes. Thanks to those that did post, as it motivated me to give this another try.

Right now I need the kick in the confidence, where later you can get lazy about commenting :-)

The images I selected for this article are from October, and of course that means Halloween and all of the sweet locations that come about during that time of year. The next few articles will come from a haunted house I worked in around the Green Bay, Wisconsin area. Each is quite different but they all share one common element; they are all shot with speedlights.

Posing & Setting
In this particular venue for testing neck-hairs had a hallway covered with painted lath board. I really liked all of the leading lines created in here and knew it would make for a fun shoot. If you can create triangles or use angles to create leading lines you should always jump at the chance to do so. Those elements really help guide the eye around the image and add a sense of tension or energy to images. You can do this with arms, legs, or the elements in the environment. Of course if you don't have any at the time of the shoot, you can always add some later :-)

I asked the model (Jaci), to take up as much space in the hall as possible. So, all of her poses are wide and full of energy. Sure, she could have stood there and looked pretty, but in this case I really wanted to use all those leading lines and pump up the energy in the entire image. The top shot is to be reminiscent of someone stopping in the middle of a hallway to suddenly check behind them, as if they were trapped. The bottom was more of a spider like pose to really play with the fact this is a small tunnel (and I also needed her to block the light in the back with her body).

Lighting The Image
Because I am working in a remote location, I decided to travel as light as I could and use only speedlights. I had 3 Nikon SB-800s and one Nikon SB-900 speedlight and a few different modifiers with me. I am using the SB-900 mounted on the camera to trigger the Nikon CLS (Creative Lighting System), but it is set to not contribute to the exposure in any way.

In the shot above I am using a single SB-800 with a small Speedlight Grid mounted to the front of the light with Velcro. This of course was done to control the spill from the light but the model asked me about it so I removed the grid to demonstrate to her how this little tiny grid can do so much (see inset at the right for the shot with no grid).

In the shot at the bottom of this article I am using the same SB-800 on a stand with a grid in the front and in the back I am using another SB-800 bare with a blue gel over the top.

Photoshop & Post Production
All of these images are very close to what came out of the camera. The image at the top has the most work done with an aggressive curve to increase the contrast.

I also used the clone stamp to remove any little bits of the ceiling that survived the grid and also pushed the saturation up on the slats to really make them almost surreal in appearance. Her hair also has another curve to pop the highlights and help bring it out of the darkness a bit.

I also added a slight reflection onto the floor to help balance the image, as a bunch of black at the bottom was kinda silly and would normally have led me to crop the image. However, I really felt the low angle would benefit from more floor and just needed an excuse to keep it there.

The image at the left has a tiny curve for contrast (as I think all digital images are a bit flat) and nothing else of note.

Hope you have enjoyed this article. Please tell your friends, use the "Like" button on the side for facebook and comments are always good motivators for me, so please keep them coming.

Safawarda

2010-09-14T11:47:00.000-05:00

Often models use a pseudonym when they are working with people. I suspect this is because some of the folks that come to these paparazzi photo events are kinda creepy. We call them "guys with cameras", but indeed they might not all be males and perhaps are unidentifiable members of either group. Anyway I digress... the model I shot on this occasion was Safawarda, and I assume this is her modeling nickname to avoid stalkers and zealous creepy photographers that just want to see random boobies.

Safa is always awesome to work with because she is a posing machine. She will move from pose to pose in seconds and each is unique and often pretty bizarre (chalk her up some points for limberness). As you know most of the time I have an image in mind, but on this occasion I was at a group event and she was next on the list for me to shoot. So, she did what she does for everyone else and performs her posing magic while I light her and take pics. I do this while scores of people watch and sneak underexposed shots of my work (cause they don't have my trigger frequency). I hate group events for this reason and tend to camp out away from everyone else and then go kidnap a model for a while.

Because she does this posing thing for everyone, I wanted to be sure the image I created was unique compared to the others at the event. I despise group shoots where everyone gets the same image, so I wanted to depart from that with the finished product that is really different and work this more into a poster type of image.

Lighting the Model

I was using one large softbox for this shot and it was placed camera left and it up pretty high, and you can see it in the original shot (I did that on purpose, just for you... no really). This is one of my trusty Alien Bees with their large softbox on it. I wuv muh beez!

Post Production
Ok, so here is where we depart from the reality others will produce and really artsy up the image. First we do our retouching and fix anything the model will hate (not always what I will hate). For example, she has a bruise on her leg I will remove, but I know she will think her leg looks fat because the thigh of the back leg is pressing on the front one in this pose. So, we will use liquify to remedy that. No one wants to show off a photo that they think makes them look fat.

We will also handle the armpit and other areas of the human body that just never photograph well. I used the patch tools as well as dodge and burn here to make the tone even, not so much remove the texture. Dodge and Burn are your primary go-to tools for skin work, get used to them as they don't remove texture and can give the skin the even tone you want.

Digital Photo Manipulation
Okay, now onto the fun part. I want to make this photo appear to be much more painterly and "poster-like" and obviously not photo realistic. Much like my previous image I am shooting for a drawn look to the image, nothing realistic as I stated before. So, first thing we need to do is eliminate some of her texture. Yes, that hurts, but if we leave it in there she will appear out-of-place with the other things we have planned. So, I use some blurring to remove her skin texture. Please note that I did save this as another file before I moved to this destructive phase. I may want to use the retouched version with skin texture later in life, so don't destroy that which is usable. After I get the texture toned down I apply a pretty strong curve and set that adjustment layer to soft light, which will increase the brightness of her skin as well as the contrast. This is already looking pretty artistic, but we not need to add some background and foreground interest.

Adding Background Textures
The first thing I moved into place was a sky. Of course this is applied with a blending mode and is going to be very subtle. I also used a custom brush that makes little circles and stars and made some swirls around her. This is one of those little touches I enjoy in images, so you will see it more often in the future as I post more of this type of work.

Working With Angles
Her arms and legs form a very dramatic pose as well as create some opportunity for playing with these angles. I added some strips of white to the image that work parallel and perpendicular to the angles of her arms and leg. I set the blending modes on these to various settings until I liked what they did to the cloud layer as well as to each other.

Final Touches
For the final touch we need to terminate this image on the bottom somehow, and a walk in the grass on such a bright day seems to be the ticket. I create a custom brush of a large "grass blade" and then adjusted the scattering, color, and angle jitter until I was pleased with the swath of greenery that was created. I choose to make the grass a color that worked better with the tonal palette I had in the rest of the image as green would have looked like ass. Make sure to place growies some behind the model as well as in front to make the grass look convincing in depth. Remember that objects in the distance are always desaturated and less contrasty then those in the front. I added her name across this image so she could use it as an avatar, and I think it completed the "poster" look I was after.

That about wraps up this image. Please let me know what you think.

Trapped In My Science Fiction

2010-09-09T09:38:00.000-05:00

I like images that tell a story, or at least hint heavily toward the fact that a story exists. Today I am exploring a bit of my science fiction obsession. Not that I am much into the books (I like a few), but I like the look of the genre more than anything. So, the image today is more of a celebration into the covers that adorn many of these geeky treasure troves than the actual void of space soap-opera spun between their pages.

The covers to a lot of these books are painted or drawn, and don't normally seem to include photography. Now, I have not done a lot of painstaking research on this subject, I am just going from my casual glances around such masterpieces as Stranger In A Strange Land and Dune (my favorite book of all time).

Lighting and Posing
As you can see from the untouched image the original shot is much larger and I choose to crop in quite closely. My reason here is based pretty much from the fact I like her expression, and from the 3/4 body shot, I don't think that message makes it to the viewer. So, I decided on this huge crop to work the emotion of her face and make it the primary focus of the image (cause you know the chest is going to pull a few eyeballs away from the point of the shot). I lit this with 4 lights:

22" Beauty Dish over the models head with a diffusion sock on it.
Medium strip light to either side with a 40 degree cloth grid (you can see one in the shot)
Background light with a barn-door on it to make things interesting (visible in the shot)

I used a grid on the strip lights to stop them from hitting the background, as the model is probably only 8' or so from the background (I would prefer this be closer to 15' to be ideal).

The posing really involved me letting Cambriea know that she will be showing emotion, getting her hand out in front and making sure she can get her hair airborne. All of these things are only possible because she knows what she is doing, and lesser models tend to do a lot of tripping on themselves.

Photoshop Retouching

To really give this more of a painterly look I decided to use a brush and destroy a lot of the detail in her hair. I then basically blended together the strands into larger groups of color. Eliminating that as well as a lot of the eyelash details tend to lead one to the sketch type of look. I also have a plug-in I use for some of this stuff, but I tend to knock down the overall effect as I think it is a bit overdone and too strong.

I added a background texture from the FlyPaper Texture Series - Summer Painterly (great investments for $40), and set the blending mode until I like the effect (divide in this case, and only available in Photoshop CS5). This helped set the "alien sky" feeling that fits our science fiction genera. I then used a rough brush with scattering enabled and erase parts of the background over the model. I did a quick job here as the blending mode didn't do much damage to her at all, so it was only a few places that bothered me.

To round out the image I needed to add a bit of a foreground element to help tell the story. I used a few custom brushes of various geometric shapes and placed them on top of each other until I was happy with the geek factor. Adding in a bit of an odd directional motion blur made the image complete. I set the blending mode of these shapes to make them compliment the image, rather than just sit on top of it.

Please view the image at full resolution by clicking on it so you can see the level of detail available. This image isn't anything special at the smaller size.

Total time: ~30 minutes.

Frankly Scarlet

2010-08-11T11:30:00.000-05:00

When I take a portrait I want the subject to be the focus (duh), but I also want there to be interest to the image outside of the individual. Often one can accomplish this with props, texture, or even light.

The star of our work today is Sabrina who has stellar features, wonderful complexion as well as a mighty high pain tolerance. As a professional fetish and bondage model, she could easily kill me (but probably in a fun way).

Lighting The Model
I typically want to "sculpt" my subject with the light, and I tend to prefer a high contrast between the light and the shadow areas of an image. This image has a very low contrast between the light and the shadow, mostly caused by the large softbox camera right working with the other 2 lights to her sides. the only area that really isn't directly illuminated is her left cheek, so we get a but of dark sculpting before you then encounter the light area created by the left rim light (small strip box with cloth grid). You will find this is a typical rim light setup with me, as I really like those highlights, and I think these strip lights are pretty much my favorite tool.

As you light things you should ponder what areas to which you want to draw attention as you can darken, add lighting to areas you want to emphasize, and so on. With a more even lighting, you get a very flat image with nothing really popping (I call this "fat light"), so be careful not to "over-light" your subject. This was a difficult thing for me to grasp initially, as I though the goal was to evenly illuminate the subject, but that is exactly opposite of what you really want.

to paraphrased quote I heard Joe McNally say is "it isn't what you light that makes something interesting, it's what you DON'T light". So, consider this when you setup your lights. One of the biggest mistakes I see are the people that put a softbox on either side of the camera in front of the model and set them to the same levels. This will produce a very even light with no character or sculpting ability. Consider it your goal to take a two dimensional medium like your monitor or print and make it as three dimensional of an image as possible, and you can't do that with flat lighting.

Post Production With Photoshop
I have one goal here and that is to "pop" her right off the page, and to do that we need to darken the background a bit and lighten her at the same time. Adding contrast to the image will help pull her forwards right into your living room.

The most annoying things needs to be addressed first... she isn't looking directly at the camera, but it is so close it will be annoying to the viewer. Her gaze should be obvious, and this "almost" is going to need fixin'. Luckily, it is pretty simple to resolve here by making a copy of the inside of her eye (iris and sclera), shifting it over and then erasing the edges to blend back into the lashes and eye socket. All of 2 minutes to fix if you toss in a few seconds to remove any overly large eye veins and contact lens edges. Oh, little tip here NOT to remove ALL of the eye veins, it just looks weird if they don't have what one expects to see in the eyes of a human. While we are on the eyes, we will also use the burn tool at 6% and add a bit of eye-liner as well as brush over her eye brows a bit to darken them slightly.

I then took some time to remove some of her scars from adventures past (mostly on her arms), and a few minor red spots. She has exceptional skin, so there was not a lot to do on her outside of the previous step.

The next thing we need to do to increase contrast and that silly slider in Lightroom isn't magically going to do it for you. In this case I like the background gradient already in place (usually considered a lighting error), but I don't mind it here at all. In fact, I think that adding a texture over this will help raise the interest level of the image as well as add that contrast we seek.

To add background interest I will use yet another texture from my Fly Paper Texture Collection (don't mean to keep pushing this, but I do use it a lot and consider it a very valuable tool). To apply it I selected a blending mode that worked with the background (Hard-Light), and then masked out the model with an 85% hard round brush. Note that I am not taking a lot of time to mask her out as the blending modes are usually pretty forgiving. And lets face it folks, we are not sending someone to the moon here, so close is good enough in this operation.

Next I want to pop the model a bit, and using a curve layer set to the Soft Light blending mode, we curve her until we like what we see (not that it sucked to start with by a long shot). I will also add an additional curve for her hair to increase the contrast there a bit and a slight color boost.

Finally I will crop it in a bit tighter and add my signature in a non-obtrusive manner. I normally like to select a color from the image and then set the signature on a layer with a blending mode. I want it there if someone wants to read it, but I don't want the eye to go to it. Enjoy the image, not my signature is my mantra :-)

Overall the goal for me here was to increase the contrast from the original as well as to add a somewhat surreal treatment of her complexion and hair to create an image that moves the viewer. I am quite pleased with the result. Total time to complete ~45 minutes.

If you have any questions, as always feel free to post them in comments.

Beauty Isn't Skin Deep

2010-07-27T17:10:00.000-05:00

I thought I would take some time to cover more about retouching skin and some of the techiques I use. There are a ton of ways to do this the right way, and a bunch more common ways to totally screw it up. So, lets eliminate the blurring of skin as a method of fixing skin and put it under another category like "ways to look like a total n00b" or "things you learned that you should forget tomorrow".

There are many solid ways to retouch skin, but the goal is always the same: the skin should look natural and as if it has not been edited at all. So, as you use whatever techniques you find to be your bailiwick, keep in mind that if it looks retouched you should start over and place whatever method you used into the hopper with blurring the skin.

I did create a video of me working this image and will put it up if people are interested. I would like to charge for it as it helps pay for some new equipment but would love to know what would be a reasonable price. If you have an opinion, or if you think this would be valuable, please let me know in a comment.

Lighting the Model
We shot this in a hotel room in Kewaunee, Wisconsin as it was colder outside than expected. We had several trusty Nikon SB900 speedlights with us and some softboxes. The key light here is a 28" softbox powered by a speedlight. There is also a speedlight hitting the ceiling to bring up the ambient in the room so the shadows on her face will not be so dark. We also have another speeedlight camera right to add some interest to the shoulder, as if the light is coming from the window. Now this gets a bit tricky, as I know I want the light to look like the window is the source, but in reality we had the shades closed as the color outside was some weird green shade, like you get just before some huge twister drops a house on some witch somewhere. I decided to pull the shades and add the brightness after the fact, but in the correct color. I could have added gels to all the speedlights, but it isn't hard to just eliminate the odd-man-out and work it in post. I know I would be retouching this image because the model was a little self-conscious about her complexion on this day, so hitting the shades would not be much additional effort.

Posing The Model

The pose here isn't anything amazing as it is quite natural. The few things that bother me after-the-fact as the tilt of the glass and the fact the back of her hand is toward the camera. Try and avoid that as veins are not pretty and with just a bit of additional lift, we would not have a problem. The glass has a slight tilt to camera right which bothers me, but I will live with it as the effort to fix it isn't worth it as I am probably the only person that noticed it until I said something.

Post Production & Skin
Aside from adding brightness to the shades we will also need to fix her skin in a few places. I used liquify on her arms to drop a bit of weight as she mentioned a few times how she hates her arms. Listening to the model can help you know what areas should be your focus so in the end they love the image and feel good about themselves.

You might have noticed that the final image is flipped. I often flip the image several times as I work on it to give my eyes a chance to refresh and see things I might have missed before. In the end, I don't decide on which flip I prefer until I am done. Also, remember that people only see themselves in a mirror, so they tend to prefer the opposite view.

There are 4 main tools used in *properly* retouching skin. You will use ALL of them, and depending on the image one will have more prominence then the others. Here are your weapons:

Clone Stamp - Use at between 40 and 60% opacity
Patch Tool - Used for large areas and should be feathered
Healing Brush - Awesome tool. I prefer proximity match
Dodge & Burn - Your main tools! Learn to use them.

There are a few others, but those are a bit advanced and seldom used.

Also, a little hint... the dodge and burn tools are related, so if you are using one and just hold down the ALT key, you will switch to the other. Since you use them a ton, this is a great set of tools you can use with only a single keypress.

Describing how to use the tools is a bit difficult, so I made a video of my work on this. You get to even see me screw up a bit :-) Let me know if you want the video, as it will be a large download. I am thinking I will ask for a $20 donation, but let me know if you think this would be valuable at that price. I really don't want to start charging for info, but I also have to eat :-)

Pump Up The Volume

2010-07-06T16:47:00.001-05:00

The image I want to discuss today is one of those *zingers* that captures people's attention. The cleavage probably has something to do with it, but more than that I feel it is the sense of motion and action that brings the eyes over to see what is going on.

Our image today features Cambriea, probably my most photographed model and someone I have worked with since I got into photography. I am completely obsessed with hair in my photos, especially the long type. So much can be done with it and when it is in motion, you can really hear the choir of angels singing. Often I use fans, or a good breeze, but sometimes you resort to the "hey, whip your head around real fast and don't fall over" technique.

Lighting The Model
Today we are using 4 lights, and this is my first run using my new Einstein strobes from AlienBees.com. I am really happy with them and can't recommend them enough.

Our key light is a large reflector (22") made of stainless steel. The AlienBee people call this their Laser Reflector, but basically it works like a silver beauty dish. I have this over the model and slightly in front of her. Off to either side are small strip boxes with 40 degree grids to help keep the light off of the background. Behind the model and camera right is another strobe with a barn-door modifier on it aimed at the white wall. I did this just to create a bit of visual interest rather than just having a flat gray surface.

I even remembered to take a shot of the lighting setup. It really takes the magic out of the illusion as you can see the meager environment in which it was shot. Basically a plain white wall and about 10'x10' of floor space was all that was required.

Posing The Model
Posing consisted of "...do that again and again until you are almost ready to fall over" series of hair flipping. The directive of "get your arms out" is the only other piece of advice I had for her. Overall I think 10 of the 80 turned out well and will probably fiddle with those someday.

Post Production In Photoshop CS5
Well as you can tell we have more work here than one would probably expect. First we have some physical *oddities* that have occurred due to the swinging of the arms and head to create the dynamic image. So, using liquify we need to adjust her "ladies" so they are even as well as take that bump off the waistline of the shirt on the pants camera right. The neck on camera left was pushed forward by her shoulder while turning, so that looks all wonky and needs to be addressed as well. The model is also self conscious of her arms because mom has apparently given her some DNA she would rather give to someone she hates. So, to please her we will push those in a bit to keep her happy with the image. No one wants to hear "gee, I look fat in your photo".

Next we need to do as the title insinuated and add some hair. I borrowed most of her from another image and then masked off all the hair on the right side and added it to this image. We can then easily mask out her hand and then work on blending the two rats-nests into one happy condo of hair. Most of this was done with a typical mask and some additional painting of hairs using colors local to where the blending was problematic.

The finishing touch was the addition of the background texture. I used one of the Flypaper Textures as I like the quality and usability of them. This is the "soft light" blending mode being applied to the image of the steel like texture. I did go back and mask out her body and most of the hair as the texture was not something that looked good in this case, so it was removed. I also created a curve layer and set it to "hard light" and masked in only her hair. This will really push up the highlights so I ultimately lowered the opacity down to a believable level. In the end your goal should be an image that does not appear to have been retouched. You will notice she does not have skin made of plastic or weird glowing eyes (not like you can see them in this image). To often I see skin smoothing gone horribly wrong or people that overwork the eyes. Just keep the realism goal at the top of the list and you will always produce great work.

Whipstress

2010-06-04T12:07:00.000-05:00

Continuing the celebration of Gothic Chicks from the last shoot (Sorceress) and (Lady On A Blue Chair) , I present today's combination of mistress, leather, and a damn big whip.

The image today is interesting because aside from the signature, all of the changes to the image were done in Camera RAW with a *lot* of attention to composition and crop.

Posing The Scene
This is one of the more complex pieces I have done as far as scene composition goes. The idea to add a new level of challenge to the images is starting to be a trend in my recent projects, and this is a great example of that. The S curve in the pipe on the right is where it started. I decided to work on a repeating S shape in the image and see just how far I can take it. I arranged the whip in a loose S shape as well as the model, working a rather non-conventional pose for the shot. The shadow was intentionally thrown hard against the wall behind her in an attempt to produce another S curve type of play (partial success here). It took a few shots to get it all to come together, but I am very pleased with the outcome.

The Golden Ratio Crop

To add another level of complexity, I decided to work this image at an angle when I shot it to add tension to the photo, but I got an added benefit with a minor crop adjustment.

The "golden-ratio" is a pleasing image composition used by many traditional masters, and was made famous by Leonardo DaVinci in more modern times, but appears in nature constantly. You can read about it on Wikipedia if you are interested, but you might be overwhelmed by the math (as I was, and I went to school for Physics). Basically we want a growing number of rectangles that pass through key points of the image. By adjusting the crop, I was able to get that to work, which made me a damn happy camper. If you can get this to happen in your images, you will find they are quite pleasing to the viewer for a reason they cannot explain. So, try working it into compositions if you have complete control over the situation so you can get these bonus points as well. I know Lightroom has an overlay for this, you can get to it by pressing "O" while in the crop tool. Shift-O will allow you to change the orientation of the tool, so always worth a look if you are close to this crop anyway.

Lighting The Model
As stated before we are going to try for a curvy shadow, and in order to do that we need a defined edge. Because this model has perfect skin, we can really abuse her with a harsh light. Also, given the subject matter of the image, a soft light seems counter intuitive. So, we will use an unmodified (i.e. bare bulb) type of source.

We will not need a lot of power for this shot, as I am literally at the end of the whip, laying on the floor. I put a Nikon SB900 speedlight on that cute little stand that comes with it just off to the right, sitting on the floor and angled up a bit at her mid-section. I used Nikon CLS to trigger this (I love CLS!). I was using a wide angle lens, so I know we will get distortion, but the whip is the first object to get hit, so this will work out to be very dynamic.

Post Processing
As stated before this is 99.99% Camera RAW. I do use the RAW interface in Lightroom quite often, but I mostly access this tool from the smart object in photoshop. Either case works, it just depends on your preferences and the tool in use at the time. Now, to adjust this we will want to really push the gritty factor up as much as possible. Settings I used were dramatic increases (sometimes at 100%) for recovery, fill light, black-point, clarity, and vibrance. While decreasing things like saturation. I don't want to give you the exact forumla, as I feel you should go and play with the tool, not replicate my exact recipe. I don't mind giving it to you if you *really* want it, I just suggest you play with it and learn to fish, rather than me giving you the fish.

Total time to complete ~5 minutes.

Lady On A Blue Chair

2010-05-27T09:44:00.000-05:00

I would make a lousy goth. However, I still have an appreciation for this look, but really only on women. Men just can't seem to pull off the eye-liner and other aspects without looking... well, weird. At least on the female species the goth look has an enduring appeal to me, probably because you can really bend the images into the realm of the surreal and they still work.

So, today we are going to do exactly that. We are going to take an image of a lovely Gothic model I have known for quite a while now named Jen. We have a great location in a building with several wrecked rooms and lots of texture.

Posing Our Gothic Model
Poses with models can be fun and yet frustrating. A solid knowledge of anatomy is a great plus here, and can really help you position the body so the most flattering things fall into place. We want a sexy pose, but not one that is over the top.

I am a big fan of "un-lady-like" poses on my models, but they must be positioned in a way as to not really make the position super revealing. We want sexy, not an anatomy lesson. Use of shadow as well as props and "cookies" are your tools to turn a photo from nearly pornographic to highly suggestive. The term "cookie" is short for cookaloris, and it is basically something that you put between the light and the model to add some variation or mottling to the light falling on the subject. Those fake Ficus trees make great cookies :-) In our example today Jen is sitting in a very sexy way, backwards on this chair. We want to be sure we have some shadow fall between her thighs to really frustrate your typical male viewer. The other aspect of this pose is making sure we pop the muscle in the upper inner thigh (Abductor Longus), otherwise the flat of the leg will rest on the chair seat like a balloon full of water (not good). There easy way to do this is to have the model lift her leg slightly as well as push forwards on the knee. To compound this, we want a nice calf, so she will have to push her toe into the floor. They say if a pose is difficult it will look spectacular on film. In this case I am very pleased with the left leg and the effort that was put into it.

Creative Portrait Lighting

We have a lot of texture in the room in which we are shooting. I found this chair in another room and after some considerable dusting of the seat it was acceptable to her buns. I want to light this pose in a dramatic way, so we will not be using anything to soften the light. I choose to use one of my AlienBee AB800s with a 15 degree grid, mounted on a boom. We are using the grid to control the spill to the rest of the room and confine the areas exposed to the local region of the floor and the wall behind her. The light is almost directly over her head, and that will give us the shadows we need to keep the picture sexy but not overly revealing. I metered this at ƒ5.6 at the models face and triggered it with my CST radio transmitter.

Post Production
Alrighty, now for the part where using a gothic model pays off. We can mess with this image in the harshest of ways and the model will probably love it (turned out to be true in this case anyway).

I loved the textures of this room, so we want to really compound them into the realm of the surreal. Most of the retouching for this image will be in camera RAW, and then into photoshop for some masking and any other little goodies that remain. As to not wreck your chance to expirament I will not be giving you my exact camera RAW settings for this image, but I will give you some hints so you can discover your own look. First load the image into Photoshop as a smart object, and use "Create New Layer via Smart Object Copy". You must use this otherwise your other smart object layers will follow suit. We will then double click on the smart object icon on the layers palette on the upper layer.

Clairity: PUSH it to the right. Don't look back, take it to 100%
Fill Light: Push it all the way to 100%
Recovery: Flattens the light, but also adds some bizarre effects
Vibrance: Amplifies the effects of Saturation
Saturation: What if this isn't normal? what would vibrance do then? Hmm? Play with the combination.
Curve: Always add a slight curve to digital images, they are always a bit flat for me.

Ok, so once I have my settings making the background all awesome and gritty, the model looks like crap. So, we need to take and mask this newly gritty layer to exclude the model. Now, there are places on her where the effect might be nice, so paint the model out, don't paint the background in (depends on if you start with a 100% masked layer or a 0% masked layer).

The rest of the work is basically retouching anything on the model. I did add a bit of the above gritty layer to show through on her necklace as well as the top of her thigh (both at a lower opacity on the mask).

Babe In The Breeze

2010-05-19T15:08:00.001-05:00

It is always easier to create a great piece of photographic art if you have a solid image on which to base the work. This is in fact the case with the image we will be discussing today. Most people would probably just call the original image "good enough" and move on. However, I think we can squeak out a few more bits of interest to finish off the photo. Now, this is of course a matter of personal preference. I can almost always find something I would like to "improve" later, but this is subjective and directly effected by the consumption of good scotch.

Lighting Setup
Today we are working again with my trusty AlienBees. We have a large softbox to camera left with a powerful AB1600 mounted about 5' away from the model (about 45 degrees in front and to the right). I have it so the center of the softbox is about shoulder height compared to the model. It is also angled slightly downward to make the most of the light coming from the highest point on the box. I have removed the inner baffle to make the light a bit more specular (edgy), cause I like it that way and for no other reason :-)

To camera left we have another AB1600 with no modifier on it other than the default reflector that comes with the light. I am not a huge fan of this reflector, but it does what it is supposed to do reasonably well. I have this light up pretty high (3' over the model) and angled down toward her mid-section it is also slight behind her. Since this rim light is not being controlled by a grid or other means, it will spray light everywhere, but I am cool with that here as I don't care about the background. I also have a silver reflector camera left to add a bit of fill to keep the contrast in check.

There is no background light, as we will have all we need to illuminate the background enough for me to be satisfied for whatever end processing we care to do later. I tend to shoot on white rather than green or blue even thought I plan to pull the model out of the photo. I don't care for the subtle tones left from these chroma-key background, but I do use them from time to time just for variety. They do make life easier for removal of the model, but there always seems to be a tone left on the photo that bothers me.

Posing the model
I have worked with Cambriea more than any other model to date. She is easy going and understands that I don't just want a typical beauty shot. I asked her for dynamic poses that will use a lot of space and really play to the rear light. Remember my rule from other articles, "don't point the rack towards the key light!". If the model does this, it will flatten their chest and leave no alluring shadows or highlights that really accent their curves. On this image you can clearly see we have succeeded in this goal. I am also using a big fan that is just out-of-frame camera right.

Post Processing with Photoshop
Overall the original image is fine. The lighting is interesting and the model has nothing that needs to be fixed like pimples, bruises or anything else that one might find distracting.

Most of you that know me have probably noticed I prefer desaturated images. For the most part this is true, although every so often an image is screaming for something different. When I start on many of these for post production I have an idea of where I want it to go, but often the image will tell me what works and what doesn't. Today is one of those rate images where saturation of color is the proper recipe.

Well, I screwed up when I took the image and cut off a bit of her shirt that just caught the fan when the shutter clicked. As a rule you should always leave yourself room to crop later, but in this case the fan added a bit of an unpredictable snag to my otherwise highly organized and completely predictable life (if you believe that, I have some land for sale). I simply copied the layer and moved the entire thing to the right a bit and then used the Liquify tool to pull on the end of the shirt. This was enough to make the thing look believable, so I moved on. Note I also flatten the image at this point as I have no need to keep these two layers around anymore.
The next I did here was add a Brightness/Contrast layer and add a tweak this a bit as I think most digital camera images are a bit flat to start with. I will also set this layer to "soft light" to punch the image and bump up the colors. Note that I could have done this as two separate steps, but this single adjustment layer does both and helps keep the image small.
After we have corrected the brightness and contrast we can really move on to the background, as their isn't much more to do with the model. However, by the time I am done here she will have one more layer.
The background is blah, but I do like the brightness of the white. So, I added a large "smear" of light from the left to the right with a large soft brush. This works with the movement created by the fan but does not create anything distracting in the image. This is a very subtle addition and this layer was set to "screen". Note that one layer was not enough to stand out, so this layer was duplicated to double the effect. Also, I did try other colors rather than white, and they were pretty cool, but I felt ultimately the white was the best for the overall image.
Once I had all this done I decided to take the model a bit further with some insane saturation in her hair and jeans. I added a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer and left the settings untouched but I did set the layer to "color dodge" and lowered the opacity quite a bit. I also added a mask to this layer and then "painted" on this effect for the hair and jeans as well as a few places on her skin, which makes them brighter. Normally highlights on the ridges of the arms and shoulder are desirable, so I accented them in this case.

Hope you enjoy the image, and if you have any questions, please feel free to post a comment. Total time to complete ~20 minutes.

If you would like a copy of the Photoshop file for reference, I would ask for a $5 donation to help me fund my mad little hobby. Use the button below, and if you do donate, please keep the file to yourself. Donations will appear as greenmartini.com my model and photography networking site.

I Dig Chicks With Swords

2010-05-10T11:10:00.000-05:00

I can't really think of anyone outside of maybe those being eviscerated by Joan of Ark that don't dig a chick with a sword. So, in celebration of the wicked combination I thought I would produce an image to commemorate this sexy duo.

Our model for today is the lovey Lacey and we will shooting in the dark recesses of the basement under my studio. I have 12,000 sq/ft of dark spaces in which to play, even thought I often don't really illuminate this space, I love to use it for the mood it gives the model and myself while shooting.

Portrait Lighting Setup
This image is lit by two unique sources, an AlienBee AB1600 with a 22" white beauty-dish and a 15 degree grid as well as a Nikon SB800 Speedlight with a cardboard snoot. These snoots are easy to make from either a spaghetti box or a cereal box. If you cover them with gaffers tape they can be very durable and a cheap alternative to some of the other options on the market.

The AB1600 was placed directly overhead on a boom (3' above her cause I only have a 7' ceiling down here) and metered at ƒ/8. The SB800 was placed camera left and was actually behind me quite a bit. This was because I wanted the spread of the light to hit her face and illuminate the upper body and I was just not in the mood to cut the snoot down to size, so I moved it back for the same effect at the expense of power. This was metered at somewhere just over ƒ/5.6 and was to be insurance we had light in the models eyes as well as a touch of ambient to bring her black outfit out of the darkness of the basement.

Posing The Model
I wanted to do something that was interesting and yet sexy. I felt this partial draw and a unique stance would make for an interesting portrait. We shot about 30 takes or so and was quite pleased with the results on the back of the camera, but was only able to keep 8 or so because of a trigger issue.

Cyber Commander Issue
I was having one hell of a time getting the speedlight to fire. The basement was around 40 degrees and I am sure the model was getting cold. So, I was replacing batteries as well as cords in an attempt to figure out why this thing would work just fine one minute, and then fail afterward. I finally tracked this down to having another lighting setup upstairs and realized two of the receivers were on the same frequency. Rather than fire both of them as one would surmise, the system becomes confused and fires 1 unit or none of the units based on the position of Mars or something magical. So, a word to the wise, if you get this strange behavior happening you should check the channels of this awesome trigger. I love these things, so these little surprises are not going to dissuade me from using them in the least.

Post Production / Photoshop Magic
As you can see from the unmodified image, this entire scene is a bit on the dark side. In retrospect I should have probably moved the beauty-dish a bit forward and angled it in towards her face so I could illuminate more leg. However, all is not lost as I think there is a lot of merit to the mistake in the great shadows and contrast here and we can easily bring back any lost details with some magic.

First thing I did was create a curve adjustment layer and set the blending mode to "soft light". Even if you don't touch the curve at all, you will find the image a lot more exposed. I use this trick over a duplication of the entire image because it keeps the file size small and we still get the benefits of the curve. I did fiddle with the curve a bit to bring up some of the shadow while avoiding a blowout on the lighter parts of the image.

Next I created another curve adjustment layer and masked in her outfit and the sword. I also set the mode of this layer to "soft-light" and ended up duplicating it to double the effect.

Returning to the base layer of the image I used the dodge tool to increase the exposure of the ground around her. I am not at all concerned about how fake this might look, as I am not going for realistic here in the least. I also love the gritty feeling the dodge and burn tools give to concrete, so I was all for this texture increase.

To finally round out the playful nature of the image I added the glimmer to the blade of the sword. This was just a simple X shape with two layers set to different blending modes to make the light pop. Sure it looks totally fake, but I love the hero/villain look and this was mandatory to that feeling in my opinion.

As always, please take a moment to comment (even thought I know most of you won't). :-)

Dear In Headlights

2010-05-03T11:16:00.000-05:00

In several of my previous posts I have shown shots from the "Heavy Metal" shoot I did in the Green Bay area. Today I want to cover another shot from this event and discuss the particulars that might be of interest to readers of this blog.

At the event they had this big yellow car (showing off my car knowledge here). It was unique in that the color was this matte-metallic-yellow and it was pretty bulbous. You car junkies can feel free to comment as to the car type if you would like. My goal was to produce a CD type of album cover image and realism was not really in play so going over the top was encouraged. First thing I needed was to find someone with shiny pants, and given the event, this was not difficult. I also needed someone with a nice behind, which was also not difficult. I totally lucked out with the addition of the fish-nets as I think the texture adds even more interest.

Lighting and Ambient Conditions

This factory had awful florescent lights all over the place, and they were not going to be useful. So, in order to have a predicable color of lighting, we need to eliminate this awful greenish hue coming from above. This is fairly simple as we just push our shutter speed to 250th (Nikon D300), and call it good. Sure, we might see a bit in the background, but we are going to overpower whatever is left with our speedlights on the subject matter.

I lit this image with 3 SB-800 Nikon speedlights and a camera mounted Nikon SB-900 using the Nikon CLS system for triggering. A very symmetrical layout with 2 on either side of the car (in-line with the model as you can tell by the shadow), and one in front on a boom over her head and in front of the camera. The two speedlights on the sides have my trusty Lumiquest III softboxes attached to them. I actually have permanent Velcro on 2 of the speedlights at all times because I use these so often. The center speedlight had this nifty no-name 28" softbox on a boom arm. This was to get her cheeks and the front of the car properly exposed as there won't be any ambient to speak of to help here (we eliminated that with the shutter speed).

Posing & Capturing The Image
Posing the model here was pretty simple but also subtle. We need to be sure her hips are not square to the camera, as that will add pounds to anyone, and we all know how women love images that add weight. Secondly we need to get her stance and arms wide to add power and impact to the image. If she didn't have her arms in such a wide gesture, the image would not have the same impact. Her legs could have been together, but that would have a completely different look, and although very sexy, it isn't really what we need here. I had her twist one ankle to help with the shifting of the hips and also had her push her toes into the floor to activate her calf muscles. This normally happens when women wear heels, but if the are comfortable in them they might not be on their toes as much as they could be. Doing this will add some nice tone to her great legs.

Post Production & Photoshop Work
First thing I need to do is mask out the boring background garage ceiling. It isn't interesting and has that nasty glow remaining from the overhead lights. Once this was done, now we can work on making things pop. One of the first things I will do is add a curve adjustment layer and set it to "screen" blending mode. This will instantly add a ton of brightness to the image and possible take it over the top. You can lower the opacity or try "soft light" to dampen the effect. I also played with the curve to add some additional contrast while being careful not to lose details in the pants. Often I will add a curve adjustment layer and change the blending mode and not really play with the curve. This is the equivalent of making a copy of the image to add a blending mode, but takes a lot less drive space and keeps the image manageable RAM wise. However, if you have a curve, you might as well play with it and see if you can improve the image somehow. Experiment with things, as you aren't going to break it but you might discover something new.

Once I had her nice and bright/contrasty I decided to work on the floor. In this case I love the dodge and burn tools as they really pop the gritty feeling of the floor while adding the brightness I want here. I also took a moment to add some lights to the celing. This was just an image of a garage with copies of the lights and use of the perspective warp to get them to look realistic. We don't really anticipate people looking at them with those cute buns on the page, but just in case we want to be sure the lights look real. I also added a photo filter adjustment layer to the image to help tie the tonal range of the garage lights to the car and model. This keeps things from looking weird and unbelievable.

For the final step I really thought the headlights being off looked pretty dead. I fiddled with a lot of ideas here and even ventured to the ~~should be avoided at all costs~~ overused lens-flare tool at one point. However, I regained my sanity and went with something a bit more comic-book in appearance since realism was not one of the goals. This was a quick brush I created and applied. I made the first pass with the brush quite large and then several more passes on new layers while decreasing the brush size and changing the blending modes to screen or hard-light. In the end I feel I accomplished the goal of an over-the-top CD type of album cover and am pretty pleased with the image.

Feel free to be one of the RARE people that takes a moment to comment on what you thought of the article and the image.

Succubus Isn't Just For Breakfast

2010-04-13T20:50:00.000-05:00

Back during Halloween I had an idea for a female demon called a Succubus. One of the models (Faith), asked to work on the concept with me after I showed some sketches and design ideas. She acquired the outfit and my job was to pull off the rest of the trick. Originally I was going to put some large leathery wings on her, but after working on it for quite a while, I decided it was a bit over-the-top for my liking. This was shot in the basement of a studio where I am part owner and it used to be an old malted like factory, so it has a lot of wild textures to explore.

So, here are the before and after images. I will walk you through the setup of the lighting and then onto the post processing.

The lights were setup in a way as to minize specularity, not my typical direction. Normally I am a big fan of an obvious rim-light on the side of the model. However, in this case I was looking for something a bit "darker", and really wanted to have a shadow on the wall behind her.

The primary (key) light is a Norman monoblock that was laying around in the studio. It has a very large strip modifier on it with a cloth 40 degree grid. I think this is a 40, it might be smaller, I am not really sure as the light is pretty old (or at least looks that way).

To really pop the texture of the wall there is a Nikon SB-800 skimming the wall from the left to the right. I am not sure this turned out exactly as I wanted, but it did help the texture from the shots I have where the light didn't fire. I put another SB-800 far to the right of the model with a Lumiquest Softbox III on it and a red gel as I wanted to really warm up the side a bit opposite the key. This effect is also subtle like the other speedlight, but they help to round out the feeling of the image. Again, I notice from the other test shots when this puppy didn't keep up with my shooting. Guess I should change my batteries more often.

Post processing is comprised of a lot of layers and blending modes. So, lets start with some of the more obvious ones and work backwards.

After correcting the complexion and any little distractions on the model I white balance and prepare for the battle. The first thing I want to do it add some additional grit onto the walls. Now, rather than add some alien texture, there is plenty to play with on them already. So, I duplicated the layer and played with the blending modes while looking only at the walls. I decided on "multiply" and added a mask to block out other areas of the image. I also lowered the opacity as it was just a bit too dark. Moreover I added some additional variation with the dodge and burn tools on this layer. This really worked well on the wall behind the model, and I was careful to not go overboard on the floor, as we have plans for that space yet (insert evil laugh here).

The hair for the model was awesome. I think she said it took her almost 3 hours to comb out the rats-next the stylist created. I owed her a brownie for this effort, and I think I got the best part of the deal there for sure. To really pop her hair in the image, I added another copy and it set to "screen" (I am not sure this was the final mode, but it is probably close). Adding a mask and playing with the opacity I was able to give it some variation without it being obvious something had been altered. I also played with other blending modes here, as I tend to do once the mask it solid. Note that the mask here is NOT very detailed. You really don't need to go to extremes, just use a soft brush and stay away from the edges and it will look quite natural. You can also work on just part of the hair, like adding highlights and so on.

The last step was the summoning circle. This was in the sketch of the concept I showed the model before the shoot and it was a major part of the demon theme. In fact, without it the photo is a bit weird as far as poses and outfits are concerned. I drew the circle on a new layer and made it as large as would fit on the screen. Because we are going to use the perspective warp, we can be as detailed as we want and not worry about it looking natural. Once I was pleased with the arcane design, I warped it until I felt it looked good with the environment. For the final steps I masked out the model from the design and changed the blending mode to "hard light". This really picked up some of the red on the floor, but it wasn't as strong as I wanted. So, you do what everyone does when you want more, you just duplicate the layer again! That doubled the effect of the blending mode, and there you have it!

Making The Kitty A Bit Gritty

2010-04-04T12:59:00.000-05:00

A few months ago I shot some models that were part of a portfolio building event for local body painters and I want to discuss two images from that shoot. We have events of this type about every month or so. If you are able to travel to Milwaukee for a solid day of photography, keep an eye here for upcoming workshops and portfolio building events.

The model I want to talk about today was Alice, and she went with a Cheetah themed paint job adorned with a playful bow and some costume ears to help round-out the outfit. Both of the images I am showing from this day have been altered with textures, and that is that type of image treatment I want to discuss in this article.

I add textures to most of my images, often it is subtle and restricted to a specific part of the photo with a masked layer. I highly recommend the Flypaper Textures series as a great collection of textures you can add to your image. There is often at least one blending mode involved as a texture is rarely added directly to the image without at least an opacity change. I also shoot textures whenever I see something that has potential. So, keep your eyes open!

I took this photo from a very low angle with a wide angle lens, which will distort her hand and perspective. I really wanted the hand to look large and as threatening as I could, so the use of a wide angle here was key.

Before we get into the Photoshop aspects, lets talk about lighting for a bit. Lighting this is fairly simple as I needed to light the front of the model, but also make sure the back does not fall into shadow. I wanted to really add some specuality to her rump to help balance the shot with interest. Obviously the face is a focus area, and the black wig will be a nice contrast for the image.

There are three lights involved here:

SB-800 camera left (behind model) at 1/8 power with 20 degree grid
AB-800 with 2' softstrip camera left (in front of model)
AB-800 with huge octabank camera right at 1/8 power for fill.

The octabank is a HUGE light modifier and allows us a nice even fill across the entire image. Also, because it is so large we can back it up a bit so we have some room to move. Often I find there are so many lights in tight on the subject that it becomes a chore to step over cables and not accidentally catch one of the lights in a shot.

Before I added the texture, I needed to Photoshop out the thong from the model. It just looked a bit odd with the outfit, and I wanted to remove it. The patch tool and clone-stamp made this easy and quick work. Remember you can always use the patch tool to "borrow" spots from other areas of the image. This keeps the paint looking interesting and realistic over the patched areas.

When looking at an image for texture treatment you need to have a goal. The goal may not be what you end up with, but you need to know what type of look you desire. For this photo I wanted a desaturated look and a rough treatment to work with the dynamics of the shot. I also dislike the brown background tone that was the paper that was handy, so the textures I am going to try must be lighter than this tone if the blending modes I have in mind are going to work.

Often when a texture is applied you will find yourself using a mask so you don't completely obscure important pieces of the image, like the face, eyes, and so on. However I decided to forgo a mask for this image and just let it be a systemic image treatment. After the first texture was in place and set to "screen" as the blending mode, I added an additional texture and masked it out of most of the photo except for parts of the background. This was done to add a little variation to the photo.

The same model approched me later in the day with a slight modification to her costume. I was in the process of packing up things and she was disappointed when I said I was leaving. She said, "but I am adorable!". So, I unpacked things and took this shot.

This outfit was a bit on the creepy side being that it was a "little girl" look but with the body paint. So, I took her words to heart and added the word "adorable" in blood across the floor in front of her. The texture treatment is the same as I did above, but this time I masked her out so the texture didn't cross her at all.

As you can see from the untreated photo I also had to extend the background and remove my damn shoe from the picture. There are probably 50 ways to extend the background ranging from just a copy/paste to the "content aware scale" tool. I choose the latter in this case because it is quick and was not really going to show up well after the texture application. My ruddy shoe as removed with the exact same treatment I used to restore the background to the top of the image.

The blood is a simple font and some ink spatter brushes (I used a dark red color for both). The color of the blood is made more realistic because there is a blending mode on them (multiply) and it is working nicely with the texture treatment. Since blood is really dark red, this seemed a bit too dark to me initially but after failed attempts to lighten it, I seemed to revert to this color as my favorite.

I hope you enjoyed the article today and have a Happy Easter! Please leave me a comment or any questions you might have.

Blond Flying Dreadlocks

2010-03-30T09:00:00.000-05:00

Here is something you don't see every day, blond dreadlocks. Well, maybe *I* don't see them everyday, so I thought she was a fun model to shoot.

The concept was to create motion, emotion, and expression. The problem is making them look like the belong in the photo. The sexy look on her face and emotion in the image is out-of-place if she is just standing there, so we need to add a bit of "something" to make the image believable. We discussed a similar problem in a previous photoshop concept I shot, and I needed to come up with something nice for this one as well.

Let's start with the lighting. Today we are using a DIY (do it yourself) beauty dish. This one is made from a large wooden salad bowl that has been painted white. A cheap auto-mirror was mounded on the front side by some long threaded screws and will reflect the light back into the bowl and out around the edges. There plans on the internet for these all over the place. I eventually bought a beauty dish from Paul C. Buff since I would rather spend the money than the time. The difference with the one I used on this occasion was that it was powered by my Nikon SB-800 speedlight, not my AlienBees. This is a single light shot with reflectors on either side and a gray wall behind the model.

Post production was an adventure. I wanted to give this a lot of emotion, movement, and all that without distracting from the model in such a way as to obscure her beauty. My final direction was a "light-painting" type of effect. Creating something like this is pretty simple if you have a Wacom tablet. For those of you with only a mouse, you are going to have a much harder time. I heavily suggest you bag one of these (even the cheap ones are awesome), so you can open your creativity in new ways.

In the end there are 3 layers here (not counting the original hidden smart object I imported). Basically the model is sandwiched between two layers with the same bunch of abstract lines on it. The bottom layer has some of the lines that intersect the model removed, as does the top layer (albeit a different mask asI do want some to pass in front of her). I also changed the blending modes of the light as well as the final layer to get the best result. In the end, I wanted lines to cross and surround the model, and I even liked the "rule breaking" centered composition I often abhor.

Let me know if you like the image. Total time to complete ~30 minutes.

Subtlety Is Often King

2010-03-26T11:37:00.000-05:00

The image I am posting today is one where the post processing is very subtle. The base image is wonderful and not much was needed to bring it to closure.

We are going to be shooting at a wider aperture for this shot to eliminate some depth of field we don't really need. That means lower power for the strobes and a faster recycle time.

A wider aperture makes your focus plane very shallow. If I can carry her eyes and lips, I won' be upset if the rest is slightly blurry as I think if this is all in focus, one might find the eye has no where to start.

Pay close attention to how you look at your work, specifically eye movement. It takes practice, but once you understand how your eye moves over an image, you will have a lot more command on how people perceive your work. One nice trick to test this is to flip the image upside-down. Where did your eye go first? Because there is no "face" where your eye is normally drawn, you should pay attention to where the eye went first and see if you need to make adjustments if that landing place wasn't ideal.

Ok, lets talk about the lighting I used for this photo. We have 6 light in total, which is a lot more than I typically use.

There are two lights illuminating the background, and I could have probably done this with one larger modifier and a single strobe. However, I was shooing a lot of poses using this setup, and this is just how they happened to be at the time of the shot. The background lights are my trusty AlienBees AB800s, with the default strobe reflector in place and a 30 degree grid to prevent the model from being illuminated. They were metered at ƒ5.6 or so.

There are also two AB800's on either side of Helena here with small softstrips and cloth 40 degree grids on those. I could have been a lot more efficient with my lights in retrospect and let the background light spill onto her for rim lighting. The issue would have then been one of contrast, so moving the lights closer to the background and further from the model would have been required to get the exposures "desirable" in both locations at the same time. Remember your inverse square law here, as the distance of the light to the target makes all the difference in the world when it comes to exposure. If things are just too bright, and you are at your lowest power setting, you can always back the light away from the subject. Just remember the softness of your shadow will suffer as the size of the apparently light source gets smaller.

I used a large reflective umbrella for the ambient fill. I often like the fill light just behind & above me, or very close to the plane of the camera.

The key light was my AB1600 (the big gun), which had a large softbox attached. This was positioned camera right. I use the light triangle under the eye on the shadow side of the face to determine the correct position. You want light to fall into both eyes if at all possible.

The photoshop in this image is all about being subtle. The original image is very nice, so there were only a few tasks to handle. First, I always give my images a bit of a curve as I find digital cameras are a bit flat. Secondly, I also added a bit more brightness to the entire image. I took a moment to remove a scratch or two she had on her skin, but was otherwise as olive as one can hope for (mind blowing considering she is no longer in her 20's). Probably one of the easiest retouching jobs I have yet encountered, make that two models in a row that make this part of the job easy.

I did NOT add any sort of light to her eyes! The amazing "moon" illumination in her iris was caused by all the powerful lighting going on around her. I love it when a plan comes together.

The only effect I added to polish off the image was to create a copy of the entire work and add a lens blur. I then used a mask to remove the blur from around her face. I did this because they eye was "swimming" around the image (despite my shallow depth of field) and trying to find a place to start, and by adding the blur the eye now goes directly to her face. Another part of the problem is the brightness of her shirt causes you to look their first because of the saturation. So, I desaturated that a bit as it was really over the top after I added that curve.

I might as well pimp my free upcoming workshop on manual mode and exposure in Racine, Wisconsin on May 15th. (http://photo.meetup.com/102/calendar/12940050/). There is also a paid event immediately afterward on the basics of lighting (http://www.meetup.com/StudioMLP/calendar/12939983/). Everyone who is interested in those events can sign-up on those respective pages.

Hope you enjoy the image, and as always let me know what you like and didn't like (or if people are even reading this).

Universally Foxy

2010-03-23T13:57:00.000-05:00

Was looking through some images in my archive as I had an itch to draw something. I found an image of a model named Kristen, who goes by Mrs. Foxy in the modeling universe. The image is a good candidate for my art fix because it has a great expression and decent lighting. It is also "out-of-place", meaning her level of expressiveness is unexplainable given the lack of activity around her. So, lets add some activity!

First a bit about the lighting. I am using three lights in this shot, Alienbee AB-800s, both left and right but slightly behind model at ƒ5.6 with a small softstrip and cloth grid on them. The grids prevent spill as well as keep the light out of my camera. The key light is another AlienBee AB-800 with a 22" beauty-dish about 4' in front of Kristen and 2' over her head. It is also set at ƒ5.6, which is plenty of aperture to keep her entire body in focus.

Photoshop was the fun part, and the reason I decided to get this image out in the first place. The tool of the day is LIQUIFY! Get to know this tool (shortcut is Shift-Control-X), as you can do so much with it. Normally one used liquify to remove bulges and other little bumps, but you can also be creative with it. I have even used it to turn a head 20 degrees or so, but that took a long time. On this image there are around 15 or so layers with abstract "smudges" placed on them. Here is what I did to create these:

Create a little doodle on a new layer with a soft brush
Enter liquify and use the twist and push brushes until it is more "flame like". I did this my moving in-and-out of the shape.
Create a color overlay layer effect and set it to an interesting color on the new doodle you have just finished.
Use Control-Click on the layer thumbnail to load the transparency mask for the layer.
Contract the selection, I think I did this by 30 or 40 pixels
Create a new layer and paint in the new selected area with a similar color
Set the layer blending mode to Screen or Hard Light (or fiddle around with other modes)

This should give you a nice shape with a glowing middle area. As you add more layers of this type keep playing with the blending modes.

Add some finishing touches with some little wretched sparkles and glares on the models skin from the light behind her. Avoid using the "render lens flare" as it is just to typical. It was very simple to create the light bursts I have in this image from scratch depending on what I needed to complete the look I was after.

It should be noted that the model loved the image so much she contacted Fredrick's Of Hollywood about it. However, they will only look at a photo if you print it fairly large and mail it to their offices, along with another stamped envelope if you want the image returned. Needless to say I was dumbfounded at their grip on technology and wondered if they perhaps would prefer delivery of images via FAX so they could step into the 1980s with their review of images. :-)

Total time to complete, 90 minutes.