Damn, this week is awesome! It's been a real relaxing couple of days so far. I've been able to get twelve straight hours or photo-editing time in each day this week so far.
The more time I spend in our new old house the more and more I begin to love it, even with all it's flaws and annoyances, and all the extra maintenance that goes into living in a house. Being able to have an office, rather than the living room/dining room to do all my work in.
I love my home, I love Lindsey, and I love my job. Right now i'm a happy camper with no complaints!
With that all said, I have a bit of a different angle to tonight's blog post. Lately, other photographers, clients, and readers in general have been asking me questions like, "what camera settings do you use to get your backlighting", "what photoshop methods do you use to get your unique color and lighting?" and etc.
Those are tough questions to answer. Firstly, as far as what aperture or shutter speeds i'm using will vary depending on the situation. Most importantly, people need to understand that there are no magical settings on a camera to get "backlighting". You actually need to understand how light behaves, and how that behavior at a given time will affect your camera settings. Those are lessons i'm just not capable of getting into.
On all my Canon camera I have all the in camera processing set to zeros. Thats right, I have sharpening, contrast, saturation, and tone, turned all the way down to zero. I do this because I don't want my camera interpreting what the image should look like. I want to take care of all that myself in post processing.
If a professional photographer is shooting with film, they have a wide variety of films they can choose from to get a certain look they might be after. For example, if you're taking portraits and you want a low contrast, slightly unsaturated looking photo you might choose Kodak Portra Film. If you're looking for photos with high contrast, bold colors with lots of pop you might choose Fuji Velvia slide film. High contrast black and white photos? How about some Kodak T-Max or Fuji Neopan.
With digital, I want to go for these certain looks and I don't want my cameras "brain" interrupting my vision. My style tends to lean towards high contrast, bold and bright colors with warmth, and glow.
As far as photoshopping goes, my workflow is pretty simple. I really don't do anything I couldn't do in a dark room with film. Below I will use a photo of myself that Lindsey actually took of me, with my guidance. The photo turned out excellent and is perfect for me to use in my example below.
This image is straight out of the camera. No processing has been applied to this photo at all. You will notice that this shot is greyish in tone, very little contrast, and the colors unsaturated. The photo is perfectly exposed, however it doesn't reflect the lighting or mood of the actual moment. In this photo it seems like it was shot on an over cast day, however it was actually very sunny and bright out.
The second step in my work flow is to process this photo in my RAW image (google it) processor, Adobe Lightroom. All I did was increase the saturation, bump up the contrast a little, and increase the exposure. Already, it's a very usable photo, but it hasn't quite reached my style yet.
After I process the RAW image file, I export that image into photo shop for a few more adjustments. I will use photoshop to add warmth to the light, adjust the curves to a very slight 's curve' to give it a little more pop, and then maybe a little more sharpening. Usually in wedding portraits I will do some minor touch-ups to the face. This photo here is probably a little too warm for my tastes but it gets my point across.
Hopefully that answers some questions.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
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