Man, I gotta stop going so long between posts. I’ve been busy though, so at least that’s something. Busy shooting and editing the shots from this post and busy working on stuff for my business. I won’t bore you with all the business details like fictitious name registration, sales tax licenses, business licenses, checking accounts, etc., but I will talk a little about the recent St. Louis Strobist Meetup I attended towards the end of January.
I blogged about this time last year about attending the meetup up in St. Louis and decided to go again this year. Everyone I met and worked with last time was great, so it was a no brainer to go do it again. We shot in the same warehouse as last year, so I knew going in that I didn’t have a lot to work with, environment wise, so I decided to spice it up this year by bringing a smoke machine and really pushing my lighting skills to the limit and then coming back and pushing my post-processing techniques even further.
So, let’s talk about the image at the top of the post first, since I really like it and apparently lots of other people do (according to Flickr and Facebook). It really is a shining example of great lighting and even better post-processing. I knew I wanted some hard edge/rim light so I used two SB-600′s with Honl Grids on camera left and right to edge and rim Lauren out. I spent a while adjusting these so they were lighting her where I wanted and once I got those done I brought in an SB-900 front camera right in my Westcott Apollo softbox for the key light. Once I had everything set up I’d just have Lauren do a few pushups and fire the smoke machine, shoot a few frames, and repeat. I got several shots from this setup that I liked, but the one above really stood out as being the best of the bunch.
The post-processing was my spin on Scott Kelby‘s Extended Definition Processing (see his tutorial on the NAPP website here). I modified it a little to suit my tastes, threw in some skin softening via the Joel Grimes Skin Retouching tutorial, and played with a few layer masks and called it good. I got such good reception from this photo that I’m thinking about doing a tutorial on the whole process in the near future.
While I had that hard/edgy light set up I just raised it up to shoot a couple of quick portraits using it of George, above, and his wife, Christy, below.
I post-processed these shots in a very similar manner to the one at the top of this post of Lauren. It’s definitely a look I dig and I’ll be trying to do more of it in the future.
There was also a couple of bands there for us to shoot, and since I’d never shot a band I had to give it a try. I grabbed these four guys from the band Brown Bottle Fever and shoved them into this tight garage space and went to town lighting them. Lighting four guys evenly in a tight space is no easy feat!
I ended up using four lights for this shot: a gridded SB-600 back left, an SB-900 with the dome diffuser behind the band, another gridded SB-600 camera right, and finally, an SB-800 into a homemade beauty dish for the main light on camera right. It still didn’t look very good SooC, so I played around with it a bunch in Photoshop and came up with the shot above. It’s ok. I definitely need more small group practice – I guess I need to find some local bands in need of press kit material.
Lastly I decided to try some tighter beauty style shots with Brandy. For these type of shots I should have shot with a smaller aperture, say f/11-ish, but I decided to be crazy and shoot this one at f/4, just for the fun of it. I miss the detail, but I like the shallow depth of field, so it works out ok. I used the same Joel Grimes skin softening technique mentioned above on this shot. I really like this technique and will be using it for all of my skin softening in the future.
That’s about it for this post. You can see some more shots I did of the meetup on my Flickr by clicking here and you can also see everyone’s shots from the meetup here. Make sure you check them out as there is a lot of good talent and creativity flowing up in St. Louis. Hopefully I can get another local meetup going in the near future as driving 7 hours in one day isn’t fun, even though I did have lots of fun once I got there.
Stay tuned for more!