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09/08/2008 12:03:58 AM · #1 |
Regarding this image which I submitted to the August Free Study:
I was asked to do Bridals for a beautiful young lady at a very expensive but gorgeous french restaurant here in Salt Lake City, Utah. She chose this location because that is where she would be having her reception.
The restaurant, to my dismay, insisted that the bridal session begin at 3pm instead of 7pm like I wanted because by 5:30pm customers begin to arrive and they didn't want us or the customers to interfere with each other. (okay, it's a restaurant, I can understand that, even if I don't like the idea of shooting at 3pm).
So anyway, as we walked around the gorgeous settings (both inside and outside the restaurant), I quickly realized that all the best outdoor locations to shoot are only best when the sun is much lower in the sky or when the sky is overcast. Unlucky for me, the sky was completely devoid of clouds. I put off the outdoor shoot, starting inside the restaurant, hoping some clouds might appear, but had no such luck.
One of the scenes I felt I absolutely had to get, was right in front of the restaurant where I could get an "old cottage at the top of the mountains" appearance. The only trouble with this scene is that, at 4:00 in the afternoon, the sunlight is harshly lighting the cottage with a huge shadow (from the rest of the building) off to my right, with zero chance of getting a reflector into the sun that could redirect some of the light onto her.
I suppose I could have stuck the bride in the sun light, but I didn't want to do that. So I kept her in the shade and hoped I could compete with the sun using my flash. And besides, I was using my Canon 5D and felt I had a decent chance of pulling the details out of both highlights and shadows (I always shoot raw, and this is one instance that absolutely proves the benefits to doing so).
Well, if you remember how flash works, you set your flash exposure with your aperture and your ambient exposure with the shutter speed, right? So the best way to fight sunlight is to shoot with a large aperture and a fast shutter speed with the flash up close to the subject in High Speed Sync mode. And so this scene was shot at ISO 100, 1/1600th of a second and f/3.5.
Those settings would have been just fine, if I could get the flash in close enough to the bride to light her. And I was using RadioPoppers to fire my off camera flash (which I verified several times, it was working). But the trouble was, I wanted a) DIFFUSED light, using a shoot through umbrella which was stealing a lot of my light (but this was NOT the time to go for harsh lighting!), and b) a full length dress shot, with c) lots of surrounding area to complete that "cottage scene". But to get the "scene" the way I wanted, I just could not get the flash in close enough. And without getting the flash close enough, I was getting almost no help at all from the flash.
Here is what the scene looks like, straight out of Lightroom, with no adjustments at all (I hit the "reset" button on Lightroom to take the defaults):
As you can see, the exposure gave me lots of detail in the cottage to play with (I did NOT want to overexpose the cottage) but left the bride in the dark. (unfortunately, I didn't realize how badly she was in shadow until I saw the image in Lightroom for the first time - had I know the flash was this dark, I probably would have dropped the umbrella and gone for the harsher light)
Anyway, Adobe had just recently released Lightroom 2.0 with its new "Local Adjustment" capability. So I used the local adjustment brush as well as a few other settings and came up with this image (straight out of Lightroom with no PS work):
And so that was the image the bride saw and that was the one she wanted me to print for her. Good thing I didn't just throw my hands in the air and claim that the exposure was too hard to shoot.
So before going into Photoshop, I felt the main thing I wanted to do was to give this scene more of a "fairy tale" look. And that is something almost foreign to me because, for the most part, I like my pictures to look like pictures as they come out of the camera, without a lot of "post processing frilliness" to ruin them!
But to get the fairy tale look, I felt I had to blur some of the cottage to give it more of a dream like appearance and perhaps exaggerate some of the colors. Meanwhile, I still felt it needed to look like a real picture, so I kept some of the sharpness even while adding the blur.
Anyway, that is how this image came to be. It's a LOT more PP work that I normally do and I wasn't sure how the voters would react. As you can see by the votes ... some really liked it, some really didn't. But I'm fairly happy with me score and the bride absolutely loved the picture!
More of her pictures (engagements, bridals, wedding) can be seen on my website here:
//www.dterryphotography.com/MattAndMarissa
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09/08/2008 12:15:16 AM · #2 |
| Beautifully done, David! And VERY helpful of you to include the background, including your thought process, on how you achieved this. Even more important - the bride loved it, so congrats!! |
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09/08/2008 12:28:11 AM · #3 |
I'm not fond of the pose .. Considering it's a fairy tale photo.. I don't know many fairy tale girls that hike up their dress =)
kinda wish the pose was a little more elegant. It's still a nice photo. Just feels weird..
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09/08/2008 12:33:06 AM · #4 |
| Thanks for the details on how you did all that. It's amazing what can sometimes be done with a shot when you know what you are doing. |
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09/08/2008 12:35:58 AM · #5 |
Originally posted by yospiff:
Thanks for the details on how you did all that. It's amazing what can sometimes be done with a shot when you know what you are doing. |
I would much rather have gotten it right "in camera" as I really don't like to do a lot of processing on images. :(
In some ways I prefer my LR2 version of the image (with local adjustments) with no extra PP work. She liked processed version, so I hoped the voters might agree. :)
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09/08/2008 12:50:00 AM · #6 |
Nice result with your fairytale editing, Dave.
With the flash, I believe that as soon as you go into High-Speed mode on the flash, you are cutting it down again, so you'd get pretty much the same result at your flash sync speed - beyond that has no benefit of enhancing the flash power, relative to the sunlight, because the flash pops twice at half power, or possibly four times at quarter power, or possibly even 100 times at 1/100 power, etc, so you are cutting down the effective flash just as much as the ambient.
I could be wrong, but that's what I think. :)
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