Blogging 4 the Public -Jay Rodriguez Photography & Graphics – Tips, Tricks and Inspiration.

Seeing the Light: Workflow

If you are like me, you enjoy seeing the setup and process of other photographers.  Even if it is not an image you might create right away, you can file certain steps away for future use, such as I have done here. And if you aren’t, read this crap anyway just to make me feel better.

There are tons of people that work on a 365 Flickr project but few are as interesting to me as Justin’s.  I cannot quite pinpoint it, but his 365 makes me take a look at his work and see what he did and how he did it.  Of particular interest to me was this self-portrait he did where he used an Alien Bee and another light to blow out the background.  Thankfully, for light rookies like me, he posted a setup shot  so that I could get an idea of how he did it.

I have 2 challenges, however.  The first, I could not find a great place in my house to do this very shot other than our dining room.  Our dining room has a bright wall, so I knew I would have to push the light up to full power to blow the wall out.  Second, I have a Speedlight and two Calumet Genesis 400 strobes, but I still need to get around to ordering a pc to pc cord to fire the Speedlight with the Calumet triggers.  So I would need to use only my Calumet lights.

For this shot, I had one Calumet light high directly above the camera pointing down, shooting through an umbrella.  I had another light behind me, shot bare, at full power to blow the wall out.  My Nikon D80 and 24-70 f/2.8 was tripod mounted and set to fire using the remote control.  For a rough example of the setup, here is a diagram:

Here is the shot out of the camera:

It is kinda killing me here that I didn’t take a picture of the setup.  However, I didn’t really shoot this with this write-up in mind either.  To get an idea of how strong of a color the walls are, this self-portrait was taken against the same wall, using only an Alien Bee ring flash.

If you have the ability, you could easily have your camera process the JPG as black and white.  I shoot RAW and JPG.  So I actually had a black and white JPG to work with but also had the full color RAW file.  The reason I opted to work from RAW is I prefer the availability to make adjustments in Camera Raw, such as clarity, exposure, etc.  I also have grown accustomed to using Nik Silver to convert images from color to black and white and would rather use that program instead of the in-camera processing.

On post, I used a soft white brush to paint over any unwanted color in the background and also trim away all of my shirt, leaving just my neck and head.  I ran the unsharp filter (Amount: 60%, Radius 1.0, and Threshold: 4) on it after sizing it.  Here is what I ended up with.

The next step was to run Nik Silver Efex Pro for the black and white conversion.

The main reason I prefer Nik’s conversion utility is that it offers quite a few preset selections.  One of my favorite, for high contrast with a little bump, is called “High Structure”.  It really emphasizes the image and can help carry a greater visual impact.  Selecting that preset and toning down the structure setting just a notch, I ended up with the final image.

Overall, a relatively simple image to take.  Had I not seen Justin’s setup shot, I might not have known where to start.  I would love to try this with a softbox at some point in the future to see the different results.

Should you care to see the larger version, or even read why I took it in the first place, visit my Flickr page.