Category Archives: Post Process

Anatomy of an Image – Know Your Gear

December 15, 2011

Okay so today’s installment for photographers is all about seeing the shot in your head and knowing your gear.

Often when I’m at weddings I like to show the bride or groom or guest an image or two off the back of my camera. Sometimes I’m so excited I just have to show someone. [ASIDE: I'm not the gushing emotional type, so what is uber excitement to me, might come off strikingly similar to a simple smile to you.] At other times I do it to boost the confidence of the person I’m shooting. I want them to see how great they look in the hands of someone that knows how to make them look their best. IOW, I want to build trust.

That said, I show images off my camera against my better judgement. The reason is actually pretty simple: I feel like it fosters the idea that we photographers take all these photos at your wedding and then we go home, download the images from the cards, then upload them to facebook or twitter or whatever proofing system we use. I mean, it can’t be THAT hard to press the upload button, can it?

See It In Your Head
If you’ve read my previous posts about how I process images behind the scenes, you know that couldn’t possibly be farther from the truth. A lot of the time when I’m shooting and deciding how I want to frame a photo or what exposure I want, I’m not thinking about what the image will look like when I click the shutter. No, I’m thinking about what type of photo is going to make it the easiest for me to get to the image I see in my head once I take the image home, process it in Lightroom (and maybe Photoshop) and output it. In other words, I see the final result in my head and work backwards.

If you saw one of my previous posts, you saw the image of Nikki standing in front of a large set of french doors…

So here we have Nikki standing in front of those same doors. But here’s the problem: the blazing sun outside is AT LEAST 5 or 6 stops brighter than she is standing inside this comparatively dark room. I knew I didn’t want to create a “properly” exposed image. If I wanted to do that, I would have set the camera so the outside looks correct and then light Nikki up with a death ray flash pop that would probably send my flash in for service when I got done.

Not very compelling is it? No, I wanted to create Nikki engulfed in that light.

Know Your Gear
One way to do that is simply to overexpose the image so much that Nikki begins to look “normal” while the rest of the image blows out to pure white. One problem with that approach is that once the detail is gone, it’s gone. In this case, I’m dealing with a white dress and a fairly dark-skinned bride so that approach makes it nearly impossible to preserve the dress detail and brighten Nikki enough at the same time. The other problem with that approach is simply dealing with lens flare issues and the loss of contrast that come with it.

So I decided to split the difference. IOW, I didn’t care about the details in the trees outside, but I DID care about her dress and I know the Nikon D3 well enough to know that it preserves an amazing amount of detail in the shadows. More importantly, I know how to get all those details back using Adobe Lightroom. So this is what is going through my head when I’m telling a bride to “turn around and face me but try to twist at the hips.” And here’s the image I was seeing in my head, the same image as above but processed in Lightroom…

Everything you see above is straight Lightroom. Zero Photoshop. In addition to pushing and pulling the exposure of the image, I rotated it ever so slightly so the railing is level and I added two masks: one to increase the contrast in her face that was lost to flare and another to add color saturation to her flowers. Oh, and I toned the image slightly in the split toning panel.

Bottom Line
Know your gear! Every system (be it a camera/lens, strobes, printers, whatever) has strengths and weaknesses. I know what the Nikon D3 can give me and I know where it fails. Once you get there, you can take artistic advantage of it’s strengths and in some cases, even the weaknesses. Go out and shoot!

For the technical among you, here are all the relevant adjustments in Lightroom:

Also posted in Weddings – 2 Comments

Anatomy of an Image – Occasions Magazine Fall 2011 Cover

August 12, 2011

Here’s another post for the photographers out there. If you are a bride or just want to see wedding imagery, check out my portfolio for all the bridal and wedding goodness. My blog will be back to it’s regular programming shortly…

So here’s the cover we shot for the Occasions Magazine Fall 2001 Issue, shot at Foxhall Resort & Sporting Club with Bold American providing florals and decor. There’s more design goodness inside the magazine but we can only show the cover for now…

Looks simple huh?

So this where we started…

There were two big problems with Plan A: the SCREAMING late afternoon sunlight streaming in from the right side; and the general busy-ness of the background.

Solution to problem #1

I call it the wall of light. If you have lights already it costs you next to nothing: it’s just a big white sheet. It does two things… first, it serves as a huge scrim to block the sun (plus, it saves my assistants arms) and second, it becomes a 9 foot softbox when you light it from the other side, i.e. a wall of light. The reason I like the wall of light is because it preserves contrast in the scene (provided your wall of light is bright enough compared to whatever is on the other side) while leaving almost no shadows. In other words, it doesn’t look like you lit it at all. And that is pretty much always my goal.

So here it is: two Alien Bee 400s at roughly 1/4 power each, both firing off a Vagabond Mini Lithium battery, and a big white sheet I stole out of the laundry room at home. Impressive huh?

You’ve seen the wall of light before, here…

…and here…

…and a few other places I’m sure.

Solution to problem #2

So while I was setting up the wall of light, Heather was busy find a new vantage point with a better background, and here it is. What do you notice about these two images below?

The only difference between the two images above is the focal point: the left image is focused on the foreground plate/flower and the right image is focused on the chair. Look at the background. See how big a difference 3 feet can make on the overall “look” of the background?

I’m shooting at f/5 because I know that even at f/16 or f/22 I probably can’t get the entire table in focus (plus, shooting that stopped down will change the entire character of the image in a lot of ways) and at f/2 or f/2.8 my depth of field is so razor thin that it would be a pain to work with in post… so f/5 is a nice compromise.

30 or 40 images later we had the table decor exactly how we wanted it. So I got my tripod set up and took 5 images, each focusing on different elements of the table: the front of the foreground plate, the back of the foreground plate, the wine glass and flowers, the background plate, and the chair. Here they are laid out in Photoshop.

Here’s a little fun fact. Somewhere in the shuffle somebody moved the forks and forgot to put them back. Luckily, I had an earlier image of the forks and I managed to insert them. That is the only difference between the image above and the one below.

Here are images 2, 3, 4 and 5 with the background removed so you can see the pieces I took from each image.

And here’s the final image with a few touchups to the table cloth.

Whew!

Also posted in Commercial, Published – 10 Comments

Anatomy of an Image – Angel & The Fretz

August 11, 2011

It’s been years since I decided to pull back the curtain a little bit and let you see what goes into making some of the images you see here on my blog. I decided to do this today simply because I’ve posted a few images recently that are perfect examples of the kind of work that goes unnoticed (hopefully) but can sometimes take hours to compose and composite. So without further blabbering from me, let’s jump right into the first image.

A few blog posts ago I posted Angel & The Fretz’s engagement session where we pulled off our take on the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World imagery… The Most Interesting Groom in the World…

A number of you didn’t catch on immediately that both of the girls in the shot above are, in fact, Angel: Black Angel and Turquoise Angel. And that my friends, is what this post is all about.

Once I decided on a pose, we grabbed the first shot. I originally intended this to be a landscape shot, hence the angle of view, and I also needed to give myself a little room to crop and move things around so I shot a little wider than I needed to.

RAW Shot #1

While Angel ran off to change, I told Fretz to just sit still and chill… and when she returned we captured the second image.

RAW Shot #2

Now the astute among you will notice that the bottle in his hand above is a Bud, not a Dos Equis. Who would have thunk that there wasn’t a Dos Equis in sight at the 5 Paces? The bar staff searched high and low and eventually went out to find a Dos Equis for us. They actually LEFT to go and find one for us! How cool is that?!

So they returned with the right brew and I grabbed a third shot solely for the purpose of swapping out the beer bottle later.

RAW Shot #3

This is where the fun begins… I needed to decide which Fretz I wanted to keep. I chose the Fretz from RAW Shot #1 above which meant the only thing I need from RAW Shot#2 below is Turquoise Angel, and here she is.

Then I layered RAW Shot #2 above it…

… and proceeded to “paint in” the Turquoise Angel using a layer mask to “reveal” the layer below it (i.e. the Turquoise Angel). Here is what the mask looks like when it is complete.

Now it was time to deal with the beer bottle. The first thing I did was take the Dos Equis bottle and match the size and angle to the master shot. Here is a shot of the [rather sloppily cut out] bottle side by side with the first bottle so you can see where it’s going to be placed.

And here it is in place. Keep in mind that we are zoomed in over 200% so the artifacting and edges you see (a) will not show up at normal size and (b) are exaggerated by the sharpening that is part of my blog posting process.

By far, the hardest part of this image was getting the beer bottle to NOT look like it was floating out there in space. One thing that I know from old Mickey Mouse bits was that one of the primary visual clues the brain uses to determine spacial placement is the presence of shadows. So the answer was adding a near-black shadow right below and to the left of the bottle.

So I put it all together, add a little more photoshop magic to give it the overall emotion and feel I want, and we have…

If you have any comments or questions, please let me know in the comments below!

Also posted in Wedding Industry, eSessions – 1 Comment