Portrait Shoot in one session.
Location
I chose to take the portrait shots of my wife in our own home. Although I considered outdoors the uncertain weather with predominantly cloudy skies meant that I could not be certain of reasonable light on the day.
Lighting
I decided to use off camera flash. In part this was because I had more control of the light but also I saw it as an opportunity to practice this method in an actual shoot.
Camera
I used a Canon 5D MkII. I started out using the 24-70mm lens which is wide angle but found that this provided too much extraneous background. I switched to the 70-300mm lens at or around the 70mm mark and found that this gave me much more control over the initial composition. As I was using flash I set the shutter speed to 1/125 and kept an aperture value of 5.0.
Colour Checker
I used this in two images to cover the change in lighting and then totally messed it up by failing to read the instructions properly.
Checking
I carried out the checks listed in my generic workflow (see previous blog). There are advantages in shooting at home because I could be confident that I had all necessary spares.
Shoot
Location - Home
Camera see above.
I thought I would use this shoot to try 'tethered' shooting i.e. with the camera attached directly to a laptop computer. This offers the opportunity of seeing each shot as a much larger image than is available on the LCD on camera. It worked well although there was a need to ensure that the laptop screen was at the correct angle for viewing otherwise the image appeared to be either too bright or too dark. It did however give me a great deal of information about the position of the lighting and the shadows cast on the subject.
Unfortunately I also had the camera tied to the flash unit so there was a tangle of wires that nearly ended in tragedy. If I was to pursue this type of photography in the future I would get a remote control for the flash unit.
In all I took 38 images over a period of about 1 hour.
"Back Home"
Download
There was two stages to the downloading. Images taken with the camera tethered to a computer are only stored on the computer. It was necessary therefore to download onto a memory stick and then upload onto the main computer. (I don't have Photoshop on my laptop.) For those taken with the camera untethered the download was direct to the main computer.
There is an automatic back up system on the Mac that saves to an external hard drive. For my purposes this is sufficient back up at this stage and I can see no reason for another back up system although I can appreciate why professional photographers feel this need.
As I mentioned in the paragraph about the colour checker I had failed to read the full instructions. You have to save the images containing the shot of the colour checker in DNG format. (There are other alternatives but the version I bought was for Photoshop rather than LightRoom). Annoyingly I used to follow the practice of saving all my images as DNG files but stopped shortly before I began this Course. Lesson learnt - always read the instructions and think carefully before abandoning a system that has worked successfully.
Check
Using Adobe Bridge I made an initial trawl through the resulting images deleting those with obvious problems such as over or under exposure or where the placement of the lighting was not of the best. I then went through a second time with my wife (who was the subject) and made a shortlist of 7 images that I intended to do further work on. I did not delete those that had not made the shortlist as some of them were good images but were perhaps of the same pose but different expression.
Identity
I renamed the chosen 7 and copied them to a separate folder.
Process
I did use the colour checker to set the White Balance in all the images. There were two sets - one with off camera flash and one using candles. I selected, separately, the two sets transferred them to Camera Raw and then used the colour checker chart to establish the White Balance. I then used 'synchronise' to apply this setting to all others taken with the same lighting. I then followed the steps outlined in my previous blog to achieve the desired result.
There was very little work necessary in Photoshop itself although I did apply a Gaussian Blur to soften all but the eyes and lips of the subject.
Selection
We finally decided on three images to show the results of this work:-
I did not find the workflow restrictive nor did I find that I had to change it in the light of experience. The reality is that in photography like many other actions certain things have to happen before something else happens. For example you cannot process an image unless you have taken it first. Workflows become restrictive when they are over detailed and the photographer feels a compulsion to follow them to the letter. They should be guides that remind us of things we need to do but they should never get in the way of the creative process. I would guess that the best photographers follow the same broad path to achieve the results they want but are alive to the unforeseen opportunity that is the spark that ignites our interest.
For Exercise 2 I will be taking street shots of the local Christmas Fayre. The equipment I take I will have to carry and the use of a tripod virtually impossible if not dangerous. Clearly I will have to make a number of decisions before I go and hope that I will be able to get the shot that will make the whole evening worthwhile. We'll see.
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