I love doing fashion photography. I'm not really very good at it, but it fascinates me. Skyler will catch me looking at her magazines sometimes, and she thinks I'm looking at how pretty the girls are, but really I am enamored by the creativity and precision that goes into each one of the pictures on the pages. I haven't done much fashion, but would love to get into it more. Here is one shot that I did last year for a store called M*B*Tweens. I thought I might give you all a behind the scenes look for everything it took to make this picture, from start to finish. Here we go...

Original:

Canon EOS 40D, Sigma 18-50mm f/2.8 Macro, ISO 400, f/8, 1/200, RAW

Lighting set-up: I used a Canon 580EX II above and to the right of the camera with a shoot-thru umbrella, set at 1/2 power and 24mm zoom as my key light here. The blinding light behind my tween models is an old Vivitar 3700. It didn't really have a power setting, rather it had a chart on the back that would tell you what camera settings you needed in order to get the thing exposed correctly. Obviously you can see that I cared deeply about properly exposing, haha. I fired the 580 with a MicroSync radio slave system, and then I had an optical slave unit that I bought for $25 at Lawrence Photo on the hotshoe mount of the Vivitar. To the left of the camera is a huge window that is giving some fill light to my subjects.

Post Processing:

First step was to import it to Lightroom 2. You can tell from the original that it is very flat in tonality, so my first order of business was to make sure and give some dynamics to the curve of tones. If you look at my huge list of actions below, you can see what I did to get the color balance that I was looking for. Next to that you can see all the sliders I moved around to get the image the way I wanted it. On the image itself you can see what all these adjustments gave me, and you can also see little grey dots that are really distracting. These show where I made my adjustment brushes for things like enhancing eyes, softening skin, drawing less attention to some objects that drew attention away from the subjects. As you can see, the image is really warm overall, which I am normally drawn to, but it lacks punch and can become boring in no time. So, I opened the image in Adobe Photoshop CS4 and went to town.

The beauty of using RAW and Photoshop together is that you have the ability to edit your images as "Smart Objects." So you can apply a ton of adjustment layers and then at anytime go back to CameraRAW (a plug-in for Photoshop that allows you to edit your RAW photos. The adjustments you make in this plug-in are almost identical to what you can do in Lightroom) and edit all the sliders on the original image as if you hadn't edited it in Photoshop yet. You can even make duplicates of the same Smart Object and make CameraRAW adjustments that are completely separate from the original. So you are stacking several versions of the same image on top of each other, and then with a vector mask on those duplicates you can include only the parts of the Smart Object that you want. This is kind of confusing, I know. If anyone wants me to demonstrate, just comment, and I'll schedule a time on USTREAM to show you how it's done.

 So what I did with this image was create two different Smart Objects and made each of them have a different white balance: warm for the subjects and cool-ish for the background. So now the image has some interest because it's not being suffocated by warm tones.

There you have it! If you have any questions about my in-depth editing process, or what all my adjustment brushes were, or if you even have an easier way to edit just comment!

Strobist Info: Canon 580EX II left of camera zoomed to 70mm with a full cut of CTO and shot through a translucent umbrella. Fired by a PW MiniTT1 in the hot-shoe of my 7D with a PW FlexTT5 mounting my 580EX II in HyperSync mode, allowing me to shoot way faster than my sync speed of 1/250. I dialed in -1 EV in the camera to dim and saturate the background a bit, and then I think I had my flash +1/3 EV. Gotta love off camera TTL!

10 Things Not To Do On Stage In 2010 That I Did In 2009

1. Wear the exact same outfit three weeks in a row (and I bet you can guess exactly what outfit I am talking about).

2. Rely on the cheat-screens in the front row to recite scripture.

3. Mumble through a line of a song that I have forgotten the words to.

4. Give the cue to the band to start an upbeat song in the middle of pastor praying for the offering.

5. Wink at someone in the crowd. It was totally by accident, I promise.

6. Close my eyes so much that I forget where the microphone is and consequently hit it with my mouth. A bloody lip during the worship is never good.

7. Call out the lyrics to the wrong verse. When we sing a song like Happy Day and I tell the congregation that the lyics to the next part in the song are "greatest day in history..." and then sing "when I stand in that place..." it can be quite confusing and equally as embarressing.

8. Say "good morning, High Street" to start off a Sunday evening service.

9. Say "come on, sing it out church!" in an Australian accent.

10. Take the stage and lead a congregation in singing praises to God with a prideful, unauthentic heart. Probably the dumbest and yet most common mistake I made in 2009. That might come as a shock, but with the responsibility of leading comes a lot of distraction, and unfortunately some weeks I found myself distracted more often than not. Reading the latest post on eddielyons.com reminds me that God is in control of High Street Baptist Church, and my greatest human efforts are not enough, but His faithfulness is more than enough. So I am going to let go of the baggage that comes with the position and truly worship Him with every note and every word. I would like to encourage you all to do the same. As you go to your respective places of worship today, or tomorrow, or any day of the week, bring Him your full attention. If you are going to sing then mean every word that leaves your mouth. You have a reason to sing because He has done countless things that deserve gratitude. Do me a favor by commenting on this post and naming one thing from 2009 that gives you a reason to sing praises to the Lord.

Before I get into this post, I wanted to mention a new page that I added yesterday that I'm pretty excited about. If you click on "LIVE" in the navigation at the top you'll go to a page where I have embedded a feed from my page on USTREAM, a new service where you can stream live from anywhere as long as you have internet access. The best part is that you can broadcast right from your iPhone, so every now and then I will broadcast interesting things that are happening. Sometimes even photoshoots or my workflow for editing pictures or something along those lines. You never know when or what I might be streaming live, so check back often to see what's happening. If you are following me on Twitter then you'll see a tweet every time I start broadcasting, so you can always be informed. Technology! Now! Onto a new post!

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I'm gonna tell you about a little trick I learned from Joe McNally that I used for this last shot. When you first look at this picture it looks like I used the warm light coming from the sun as it sets, but the truth is that the sun was actually stuck behind some clouds as it was setting and there was no hope of it poking back out. But I wanted the nostalgic, fuzzy-feeling light that comes with the setting sun, so I took matters into my own hands. Above and to my left is a "bare-bulb" 580EX II with one full and one half CTO gels on the front of it. When we refer to a flash as being bare-bulb, that just means there are no light modifiers for the flash to go through to soften or shape the light. This mimicked a sunset because it was warm and harsh. Like my previous post, I had my 580EX II mounted on a PocketWizard FlexTT5 and was triggering it with a MiniTT1 in the hotshoe of my 7D, so I didn't have to worry about the power setting. Within a few clicks of the shutter button I had the exact exposure I wanted. So when available light just isn't doing it for ya, you gotta take the reigns and get you some good light!

If a lot of this just seems like a bunch of words that make no sense in your brain, check strobist.com. Start from the beginning and you'll learn everything you need to know. David Hobby is the guy who writes the blog, and he's pretty dog-gone smart. It's a fascinating thing to get into!

I promised some people that I would use this blog to be a bit transparent about nerdy photographer things such as lighting set-ups, post-processing, camera settings, and the like, so I guess I ought to get it started. Here we go....

For any photo, no matter what it is, the way you model your light will have the greatest impact on your outcome. You can have a killer camera that will let you shoot at ISO 12,800 with no noise at all and lenses that are heavier than your car, but you will never set yourself apart from the countless number of other photographers who can afford the exact same gear you have if you don't know anything about light. I'm not saying I know very much about light, but this is just something that every author has said in every photog help book I've read. So I'm working on it. For this shot I used two Canon 580EX II speedlights off camera fired by TTL Pocket Wizards. I had a MiniTT1 Transmitter in the hotshoe on my camera and two FlexTT5 transceivers on both of my speedlights. These are not cheap, but boy are they handy. I was able to get this shot in just a few frames because I wasn't having to run back to each of my speedlights to adjust their power levels. I simply used on-camera flash-exposure compensation and ratios. My key light, which is lighting up Carla's face, is mounted on a stand to my left, zoomed to 105mm, with a dome diffuser on the front, and shot through a translucent umbrella. Since I'm using ETTL, this light was at 0EV. My second 580EX II is hid behind the tree on a stand a little bit above her head and pointed at the right side of her face. This is to give her a bit of a rim light. Like the key light, it is zoomed to 105mm with a dome diffuser on the front. No umbrella, but it is at -3EV because I don't want it to be pronounced, rather I want it to be subtle and almost unnoticeable, and I think it worked. Here's a diagram:

Canon EOS 7D, 1/400sec shutter speed, f/2.8, 50mm, ISO 100

Comment with any questions you might have!

As many of you know, my wife, Skyler, and I got married on May 31 of this year. We thought it was a pretty awesome day, and apparently so did the editors of 417 Bride, so they did a little article about our day in their winter issue. I'll admit, we knew it was coming because they interviewed us and wanted pictures and all that, but it's still so exciting to actually see it! Here is a link to view a digital copy of the article:

http://www.pageturnpro.com/Whitaker-Publishing/6639-417-Bride/index.html#78