An Urban street & portrait shoot.
We love working with people, and the other day we had so much fun chasing the sun around Birmingham and when it set for the day we broke out the Speedlight had even more fun.
The shot above was a little more complex as I wanted our subject to be sat in a pool of light, but since we had only a single speedlight we needed to do something fun to create this shot. We shot it in two stage, one that had Emily stood close with the light then another ‘clean shot’ then just layered the files in Photoshop by opening them up in from Lightroom as ‘files in Layers, then used the Auto-Align tool and just used the mask tools to remove our lighting source. The rest of the images are as said below.
The brief for the day was a private commission and to grab some nice portraits, so, we were pretty free to play away.
We was shooting with:
- Domke bag
- D800
- Sigma lenses (35mm & 105mm)
- Lee Filters & Universal matte box
- 0.6 soft ND Grad + 0.9 Hard ND Grad
- Pocket Wizard TT5 + Godex Speedlight
- Lexar Cards
- 3 Legged thing Tripods
We used Lightroom for the selection & quick edits then Photoshop CC14 & Colour Look Up tables to adjust the colouring of the images.
Wonderful assistant for the day & BTS photos by: @EmilyDarcyAdams
These images (above) are shot using natural light only with the the filters to shade and shape the light. We had the Universal Matte Box on the camera which also acts as a holder for two filters. We have the two ND Grad filters in giving a top and bottom vignette and buy sliding them about and rotating the holder we can create some great shadows and shapes leaving elements brighter at will.
These images (below) were all shot using both the filter kits and a speedlight, with a single CLUT layer added in photoshop after. For some of the images with lighting points much higher than out subject, we mounted the Speed light on to the Monopod section of the 3 Legged Thing tripod and Emily held it up, this meant we could get our light right over the subject to give a really dramatic look in an instant.
For these black and white images – we just used a very simple BW conversion. The Gradient maps layer can give you a fast way to convert your images if you white balance in Lightroom or Camera Raw (or use the Camera Raw Filter in PS CC14). We then added some punch and grain using the noise filter on a gray layer set to 50% and in Soft Light and a Curve Adjustment. Both these last steps could be done in the Camera Raw Filter though if preferred.
