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.