Portraits from the Balcony

I did a quick portrait session for a friend of ours who is finally getting her Feldenkrais website up and running. My wife, Ellie, is doing the design, and after they finished talking shop I whacked this little scene together.

This is actually a place I've been thinking about for a portrait shoot when we moved into our apartment nearly a year ago. I never really had an excuse to shoot anyone here, although the eternally driven Chase Jarvis might say I never had an excuse not to! Anyway, excuses aside, I knew I didn't want to do a typical white background, and Ifat is a very organic and funky person, so I thought the surroundings suited her quite well.

The first thing I did was set up a snooted strobe on the railing from the balcony above, coming in just to the right and above my shooting angle. This gave a nice little pop of light onto the marble wall, which is actually meant to be a fountain, if they would ever turn it on. It helped soften Ifat's shadows from the key lighting and also added shadows to the far side of the steps in the marble wall detail. I had to remove a bit of a blue tinge due to my ungelled snoot and me shooting in daylight. That doesn't make any sense, though, because the flash should be daylight balanced. I dunno, maybe I was shooting in cloudy or something. But you get the point. You can see that blue tinge in this setup shot.

The key light was a DIY beauty dish sitting just an inch or two out of the frame to the left. You can see it here in the setup shot, which is exactly where I left it for the final image. This strobe was gelled with a 3/4 strength CTO gel which adds some color to the skin tone, and Joe McNally swears by it. I have tried the CTO thing before with so/so results, but I really like it here. Thanks Joe.

So, the image looked pretty good straight from camera, but I still took it into PS and jazzed it up. I ran a Vivesa filter to brighten the foliage and up the contrast in a few areas. Then I did some local burning on her jeans and top to make the shadows stand out a but more. I fixed up one of the tiles, removed some stray leaves and removed an undesirable shadow from her face with the healing brush tool. Using a selective color mask I removed a cyan tinge from the white marble.

From there, I saved back into Aperture, added a vignette and sharpened for web. And here we are now! So, I hope you liked what you saw and I'll see you next time.

Food in the Studio

I have finally started a bit of a push on my stock photography catalogue. This is something I have always wanted to do, but was just a bit daunted by the whole process of uploading and, above all, getting my pics accepted. It's not that my pics totally suck, rather I used to do just a little too much in the land of levels which led to a whole host of little baddies, like posterization.

Here is an image which was denied for that very reason. Posterization is when you get blocky pixels in a typically dark area. This is due to not having enough detail to bring out the colors or shadow transition you desire. You can see, if you look closely around the belly, that the shadowy bits are quite blocky, and the only way to fix this is to go back to the original and be more careful when trying to recover some of that detail.

Baby on the Horizon

So, I've gone back over that image and will be trying to upload again. Hopefully my eye is a bit better for these things now.

One of the areas I'll be focussing on now is food, because it never gets tired of you taking its picture and it's tasty! Thanks to The Strobist I have learned a whole ton about studio lighting and the whole process is going a lot easier than I thought. Here is a glass full of pomegranate seeds I did the other day.

When I go online and see some people's stock catalogues I crap myself thinking about how far behind them I am, but then I remind myself they all started somewhere. If I don't kick myself in the ass and get going now I'll never do it.

On Assignment - Lindsay Parfitt

I went on assignment with my American buddy Chadd yesterday to take some pictures of Lindsay Parfitt for the Sur in English. Lindsay is the wife of Rick, rhythm guitarist and singer for Status Quo. We were lucky enough to get to meet Rick as well as Lindsay in their beautiful house in Alhaurin el Grande. Chadd is doing a story on Lindsay for a piece about having babies and living abroad (they have twins), but he spent most of his time talking to Rick about music. HA! Go chadd.

Anyway, when we arrived, Rick seemed a little weary of what were really there for, but once he found we were so chill and just wanted to go with the flow he soon opened up. We ended up doing the shoot in their cinema room in the basement with all (or most of anyway) of his gold records hanging on the wall. I shot a few of Lindsay in front of the records, a few of the two of them by the bar, then wrapped up with a quick one of Chadd for posterity.

I was going all out with the beauty dish and a bare strobe on the records for the portrait of Lindsay and showing them to her as I went. Then I did one no flash so she could see the difference and she says to me, "Oh, I actually like that one more!" So this is what we got, and I think she's right. Sometimes you have to just leave the strobes out and go with what works best, in this case the natural sunlight coming from a door camera left. The door really acted as a huge soft box and bounced off the gold from the records to make a warm picture.

Then we moved to the bar. Rick wanted a cool picture of himself and his wife in a relaxed setting. Here I did use the beauty dish, as the door was now about 15 feet further away from this setup. Beauty dish was camera left, up high and I had a strobe stashed under the bar shooting up and back towards the green plant. I dragged the shutter just enough to get the warm glow from the bar.

All in all it was a good session and I learned a few things, such as, don't be to petty to listen to your client. Lindsay called the good shot and it made me realize I just may have been "over lighting" the scene. Happy days.