Interesting topic for the daily challenge at photochallenge.org. Only half of a portrait. That's best for everyone here. So you only are exposed to half of the stomach turning reflex that you experience looking at this photograph.
Did the clamshell setup here again with the 285HV through the shoot-thru as the top, and the silver autoshade as the bottom of the shell. Taken with the 50mm 1.8 lens that I have really been hyping these days. I'm sure that's why the price is going up.
For post, I modified the aged photograph preset in LR2. I pulled the exposure back down to recover some details.
Sorry for the subject.
Be blessed.
Labels:
clamshell,
closeup,
one light,
portraits,
reflector,
shoot thru
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Here's a quick post about trying the clam shell technique. I think I've seen it done with two soft boxes. I don't have one so I used the shoot-thru umbrella for the top and a silver autoshade from Wal-Mart for the bottom. It looks nice to me. You can see both speculars in his eyes. The umbrella was directly in front of and above him aiming down. I was shooting in the small gap between the umbrella and the reflector. It is a very flat, soft look with a slight shadow below the nose.
I did a little touch up in Lightroom. The clarity slider is really cool. I backed that off just a bit to smooth the face. Brought up the blacks a bit for some contrast. Finally, just a bit of overall sharpening.
Labels:
clamshell,
closeup,
eye,
family portraits,
kids,
lightroom,
one light,
reflector,
shoot thru
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Compared with my other hobbies such as woodworking (I have some meat missing from my left thumb), shooting, reloading my own ammunition, fishing (wading the flats), I thought photography was fairly benign. Not any more. I was taking some shots of the boys last night. Trying to capture Hez with his Batman mask on. I was not successful. But I did get a good shot to my eye. I had a microphone stand with a superclamp and my Canon 540EZ on it. It started to go over and I reached for it and BAM. What I figure happened is that I did the classic "step on the rake" routine and the stand came back and got me. Too bad you can't see the cut on top of they eye better. It is a nice one. Maybe I'll add another post if it gets worse over the next day or so.
Labels:
closeup,
eye,
one light,
portraits,
shoot thru
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Well it has been a while since I have posted. Life has been busy. I mean homelife is always busy. The "Work" work increased there for a bit. So I haven't been shooting as much these days but I am starting again. I have some family portrait sessions coming up and even a wedding (I can't believe I said yes to that but they are my friends and they make me feel guilty :) just kidding Tim and Erin. I am looking forward to it and I like you guys a lot. I need to do some research on that though. So I don't mess up their special day.
Anyway the subject here is hair. I came home from lunch and took the picture of my sweet wife at our big kitchen window. It faces east and the sun was high so there was no direct sunlight. Then my son at our big window facing west over the back yard. I shot them wide open at 1.8 since the light was low but afterward I thought I rushed it and should have stopped down to get a bit more depth of field. Even If I had to bump up the ISO, it would have been worth it.
Labels:
closeup,
kids,
natural light,
portraits
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This was maybe the first shot I have taken with every intention of doctoring it in post-processing (I use the Gimp and Photoshop depending on what computer I am on).
My daughters eyes are blue and if she is wearing blue, they look very intense. But she wasn't wearing blue last night and was eating so Daddy couldn't change her wardrobe.
My other issue is not having a macro lens. So this is cropped quite a bit from the original.
In the Gimp, I started by removing stray hairs and such. Duplicated the layer and started working on the eye color that I was looking for. So I got into color-balance and moved the yellow slider presumably to remove yellow leaving more blue. That interface was not very intuitive for me.
Now that I have the color of the eye, it is just a matter of applying a layer mask filled with black and then using a soft paintbrush with white to uncover the area of the eye that I wanted to change.
To finish, I added a vignette. I don't think I even sharpened this. I meant to but forgot.
Labels:
closeup,
eye,
gimp,
one light
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