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!

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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!