I had never really done this before, but recently I've been using flash more and more so I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to experiment a little bit without going too fancy with the lighting setup.
I brought a lot of gear with me and probably used more than I needed to but I wanted to kind of play around with it a bit so I didn't want to be short.
It was a pretty rushed job, (17 and 18 year old's don't like to hang around too long, especially when they're being photographed).
I set up a white background and lit that with an SB900. I used a Bowen's head in a soft box left of camera and I bounced another SB900 off a reflector on the floor.
I was pretty happy with the results, but in some of the images the background was lit unevenly or just came out grey.
I probably rushed the set up a little too much.
I'm a firm believer in getting it right in the camera to reduce the amount of post production required later.
I processed the images in Adobe Lightroom 2.7 and then because the background wasn't completely white in a number of the images, I took them into a newly downloaded trial copy of Photoshop CS5.
In the past I have often masked people from backgrounds and filled the background with white but it was always a painstaking process, especially if the person had really wispy hair.
No more!
Photoshop have put a new brush into their refine edge panel which is nothing short of amazing.
Within a very short time I was able to mask a person from the background including their hair.
Even people with very blond hair wasn't a problem.
Brilliant new tool and one I believe on its own makes the upgrade worth while.
Here's the result.
Did essentially the exact same job about a decade ago, but in B&W. Nice job, though might I say that a slight angling of the body would be a bit less 'passport'-like. In my case, there was no need to include the crest on the jumpers so I went in closer for a more personal shot. Very 'angelic' lighting - you could get away with it for older sitters too. : )
ReplyDelete