Here it is.  My week 2 shot.  I’m not as happy about the way this one turned out as I am with Week 1′s shot, but it’s a learning process for me, so I’ve got to take the good with the bad.  This shot ended up being more about the post-processing than about the shoot itself, which is important, but my Project 52 is mainly for improving my photography first and my post-processing second.  So the next few shots will probably be less post-processed and more about lighting and composition.

The idea for this week was to take a shot of my fairly average car, a 2004 Mazda 3, and attempt to make it look more awesome than it really is.  As you can see from the “before” shot below, there’s not much to it, though the lighting and composition help to make it look a little cooler than it is.

Yes, I know my car is dirty – one of these days I’ll get around to cleaning it.  You can see that the final shot had quite a bit of Photoshop-ing done to it to get the desired look.  I liked the stormy, menacing clouds, so I wanted to take that theme and run with it for the whole photo.  Now I know the Photoshop-ing isn’t the best in some places, but I’m working on it.  Only way to get better is to practice, right?  Right.  If anyone wants to offer some friendly and helpful tips, I would greatly appreciate it.

The setup for this one was pretty simple: 2 lights – one to accent the underneath of the car and one to light up the side closest to the camera.  Nothing too tricky here.  Here is the setup shot:

Like I said above, nothing too special.

As far as the post goes, I’m not even sure off all the steps I took, but I’ll try and run through the big ones: remove the flash and touch up the car, remove all background except the driveway, add in more cloud and match the colors, add some fog, smooth out the car, and cover up the license plate.  Again, if anyone wants to offer advice on any of those steps, I’m all ears.

That’s it for this one.  It’s getting late and I’ve got work tomorrow.  I’ve got some editing to do this week for some recent shoots, so hopefully I can get a blog post up for that before my Week 3 post next Sunday, so stay tuned!

Ok, it’s Sunday, and, like I promised, here is the very first shot from my Project 52.  1 down, 51 more to go.  Hopefully the ideas keep flowing and I can keep this up.  I’ll go through the creation of this shot from start to finish.

Planning

I knew I wanted to do a self portrait for my first week, since I’ve been using the same profile picture on every social networking site for ever and a day now, so I decided it was time for a change.  I knew I wanted to do a hard/soft light combo so I could try to create a gritty/edgy kind of portrait.  And I knew I’d be shooting myself, so I needed a way to shoot and review easily, so I decided to try tethering to my Macbook Pro for this shot.

Shooting

I set up everything in my room, a nice little compact studio if you will.  I set my tripod up next to my desk so my short USB cable would reach my computer for tethering.  I used Sofortbild, an awesome, free piece of software for tethering a Nikon to a Mac, since Nikon charges like $150 for its tethering program.  I found it works really well while shooting this self portrait; I moved the window to my external monitor and tilted it toward where I was standing so I could see.  I used the wireless remote shutter release for my D90 to shoot and then I could see the shot right away on my monitor.  Very nice.

I used a 2-light setup for this shot so I could get a hard/soft lighting combo going.  For the soft, main light I used a Nikon SB-24 in the Lumiquest SBIII at 1/16 power about a foot from my face and feathered away so it was more even and less bright.  For the hard side light I used the Vivitar 285HV at full power with a Honl 1/8″ grid behind me and to the left.  It was a little tricky to get the lights and myself in the right position, but it finally worked out in one of the last shots.  I also ended up using a gold reflector for some fill towards the end.  Here is the setup shot:

Post

Like always I imported my shots into Lightroom and sorted through them all and narrowed my shots down to my one or two favorites and tweaked them in Lightroom.  I shoot in RAW so I have the most amount of flexibility when editing – it’s better to have too much data than not enough.  This was also the first time I tried converted to DNG, seems to reduce my RAW file sizes and gives me the same flexibility, so I will probably continue to do that in the future.  Here is the shot straight from the camera.  All that his been done so far is to crop it to match the final image:

If you compare it to the final image above you can see I did a decent amount of work.  I’ll quickly summarize the edits I did.

• Boosted contrast via Camera Raw.
• Remove blemishes.
• Darken the sunglasses.
• Lighten the eyes.
• Dodge/burn to accentuate the highlights and shadows.
• Soften the skin.
• Highpass filter.
• Slightly desaturate.

I think that about covers it.  Makes me look much better than I really am.  But that’s what the Internet is all about, so I’m okay with it.  That’s it for week one.  Time to start coming up with ideas for week two.  See ya next Sunday for that installment of my Project 52!