My Wife and Her Gun

jhelms

Inspired by a recent pic posted by Tim Kamppinen over here, I took this last night playing around with some off camera flash. Any C&C always greatly appreciated; I have some ideas of things I want to change for improving this shot...

I lit this with an SB600 through a stofen and umbrella at 1/128th on her face and an SB600 through a DIY straw grid at TTL pointed at the 9mm, on-board built in flash on the D200 was set at TTL - 2.0. 1/250th, f10.0, ISO320, ProMaster 17-50mm 2.8 lens.





Original unedited:





I think I need to bring the background back down a bit, with a vignette and/or adjustment layer, and the editing that I did seemed to highlight the noise in the background, so I need to work on that as well. Maybe shoot it at ISO100 next time and bring the flash power up.

jeffreaux2

It looks as if the processing also introduced some strange outlining around some of her fingers and across the top edge of her arm.

Nice lighting though!

Blurmore

jhelms wrote:

Inspired by a recent pic posted by Tim Kamppinen over here, I took this last night playing around with some off camera flash. Any C&C always greatly appreciated; I have some ideas of things I want to change for improving this shot...

I lit this with an SB600 through a stofen and umbrella at 1/128th on her face and an SB600 through a DIY straw grid at TTL pointed at the 9mm, on-board built in flash on the D200 was set at TTL - 2.0. 1/250th, f10.0, ISO320, ProMaster 17-50mm 2.8 lens.





Original unedited:



I think I need to bring the background back down a bit, with a vignette and/or adjustment layer, and the editing that I did seemed to highlight the noise in the background, so I need to work on that as well. Maybe shoot it at ISO100 next time and bring the flash power up.

The original is a nice shot, I'm not much on the sharpening Halos on her arm and wrist in the processed version.

jhelms

jeffreaux2 wrote:

It looks as if the processing also introduced some strange outlining around some of her fingers and across the top edge of her arm.

Nice lighting though!

Blurmore wrote:

The original is a nice shot, I'm not much on the sharpening Halos on her arm and wrist in the processed version.

Thanks ya'll!


I noticed that too; it happens when I turn up the wick too much on both recovery and fill light. I'll mess with that a little bit, it distracts me especially since it's right in the middle of the pic.

Tim Kamppinen

jhelms wrote:

I noticed that too; it happens when I turn up the wick too much on both recovery and fill light. I'll mess with that a little bit, it distracts me especially since it's right in the middle of the pic.

I never knew I was so inspiring! Anyway I know exactly what you're talking about... look like you did the quick and dirty "poor man's dave hill" in light room or camera raw. I like your original, but having experimented with this processing before myself I can spot it a mile away and the lines that show up from overcooking the fill and recovery sliders drive me crazy. There's good news however! I eventually saw the light! What do I mean? Well, this might interest you greatly:

http://dustinsnipes.com/blog/index.php/2009/01/tutorial-photoshop-for-70-basketball-portraits-in-in-two-days/

That tutorial shows the basic method that I used to PP this shot:



which for me, anyway, was the type of thing I was always trying to get when I did the camera raw slider hack, but never could. Just remember, the main thing is the lighting (rim lights from behind to give you the highlights and a light from the front to fill in the shadows.) The post processing is just exaggerating the highlights and shadows that are already there to get that "shiny" look. Have fun!

jhelms

Tim Kamppinen wrote:

I never knew I was so inspiring! Anyway I know exactly what you're talking about... look like you did the quick and dirty "poor man's dave hill" in light room or camera raw. I like your original, but having experimented with this processing before myself I can spot it a mile away and the lines that show up from overcooking the fill and recovery sliders drive me crazy. There's good news however! I eventually saw the light! What do I mean? Well, this might interest you greatly:

http://dustinsnipes.com/blog/index.php/2009/01/tutorial-photoshop-for-70-basketball-portraits-in-in-two-days/

That tutorial shows the basic method that I used to PP this shot:

which for me, anyway, was the type of thing I was always trying to get when I did the camera raw slider hack, but never could. Just remember, the main thing is the lighting (rim lights from behind to give you the highlights and a light from the front to fill in the shadows.) The post processing is just exaggerating the highlights and shadows that are already there to get that "shiny" look. Have fun!

Cool - yep, as soon as I saw your shot I was like "I gotta try that tonight!" - for real, and it was a pretty fun mini-shoot.

And yep, on the LR edits, I did a quick-n-dirty over-processed look with really liberal use of recovery, fill light, clarity, contrast and vibrance.

I love those Dustin Snipes bball shots - thanks for the link to those; and good work on your shot as well!

sweet caroline

I like the original better;)

jhelms

Revised edit of original pic to still retain some of the contrast and vibrance but remove the oversharpened halos:





Few other poses...





Too squinty / smirky