My Final Shoot (Portrait)

I booked out the Nikon d40x and the Nikon Speedlight flashes to shoot my subject on location in Birmingham at a location that I know as a spot skaters go to. I knew that at this location there are concrete block benches but skateboarders use these blocks to perform trick on. knowing this I could get my subject to sit down on the bench and then obviously show this in the picture giving another pert to the story; giving the viewer enough visual information to show what the skateboarder uses the concrete bench for. before going to the location I drew down some possible compositions for my photographs and how I would like my subject to appear in them. getting these down onto paper saved me time thinking about it too much at the location but instead I had a plan.

When I collected the camera gear from the DAC morning of the shoot I had never used a set of remote flashes before and so I was little nervous as to whether I would be able to pull of the shot I wanted so I decided to watch a youtube tutorial on how to use flashes on location.

On Location Flash Video

After watching the video I was a little put off as I couldn't find anything on how to make the scene more dramatic having the under exposed background and perfectly exposed foreground, as the only videos I came across showed how to balance the background exposure with the subject. So i decided to take my housemate out into the back garden before we set of to practice and try to figure it out for myself. When thinking about what the flash was doing I realised that it lights up the particular area that it points at with a burst of strong light. meaning that everything else should be under exposed just as if I purposely underexposed any sort of picture. That meant that i could change the aperture to not let as much light into the body of the camera and therefore take an under exposed image but because the areas the flash was reaching were so bright those areas reached perfect exposer (after a little bit of trial and error).

 This first image shows the subject hit by the flash. I managed to gain perfect exposure for both the background and subject. Which is not what I wanted.

The second photo came after a bit of a eureka moment and I figured out how to under expose the background away from the foreground subject.

At the location I played around extensively with different lighting techniques and positions giving me the advantage of building together the photograph until I figured out the best ways of doing so. I wanted to photograph my subject using a harsh light so that it would add a more dramatical effect onto the image so that the skateboarder would work well with the rest of the image qualities. I was very inspired by lighting not only the model but the scenery around them to show the environment that they are in. I eventually settled on placing a single flash almost next to myself pointing at the side of the concrete block adding more depth into the image.

Here are a selection of raw photographs to demonstrate the process I went through:

Here I begin by using one flash to highlight the face of the body of the subject.

I then focus that light to the face of the subject, creating the harsh contrast I was after.

I then get the second flash to light the skateboard and feet of the subject.

I then add another flash to light up the side of the bench bringing the scenery into play with the image more.

Now I have everything set for the right set up it is just getting the final photograph taken.

 And finally the raw final photograph.

This is a photograph of the set up after I had taken the photograph.

I found that taking the images and creating the scene I wanted in the frame through using studio techniques, meant that I pretty much had very little to do post production as I had done all my editing at the shoot in a sense. The only adjustments that i had to make was to warm the temperature of the image up as the raw image was quite blue in colour. I also used the clone tool in photoshop just to edit out a single cigarette but that was on the floor by my subject and edit out dust marks that the lens must have shown which was unknown to me t the time of the shoot.

shooting in RAW meant that I also had the option to sharpen the image whilst maintaining a much better quality than a JPEG. This made the picture crisper and the dramatic effect much greater.

Okay so in the post production I opened the RAW photograph up into RAW editor which allows me to have access to a much wider selection of tools that will maintain a good quality to the image. First off, I think that the original image is too blue in colour maybe because the white balance on the camera was thrown off, I'm not too sure, or maybe that is just a characteristic of using the flashes and camera in the way I did. But that's fine because the RAW editor can easily fix this by using the temperature slider to warm up the image to normal again, as shown below.

I then looked closely into the image and found that by using the sharpening slider i can make the image appear more crisp as you can see in the before (above) and after (below).

I then took the image into photoshop to make some very slight tweaks to the image so that it had a nice tidy finish.

This is the RAW Edited version of my image and as you can see it doesn't have many changes that need to be made.

A small change that I made was to use the clone tool to edit out this cigarette but from the image.

After that was gone I discovered that the lens must have had dust on it as I noticed small dark marks in the picture.

You can see the before and after above and below this caption. 

Having done that My final Photograph was Complete.