Day 183

183/365, originally uploaded by Aaron LaRue.

I had a 6 hour photo shoot today.  

I was shooting some stuff for my mom's new salon (Day 175) and we did some serious work today. Not only is my mom a hair stylist, but she also got certified to do make-up professionally about a year and a half ago. We cranked out 5 looks on 4 different models, with my mom doing the hair and make-up for all of them. Admittedly, her job was a little tougher than mine today, I had a lot of hurry-up-and-wait going on.


I had to be on my toes, though. Because I'm antsy (and maybe even a bit dense), I used a different lighting set-up for every look. I had everything from one light to a traditional 3-point lighting set up, and I was coming up with it on the fly. It was kind of like a pop quiz, and I actually had fun with it.


Today's picture is a one light set up. After I got the shots mom needed, I killed everything but the key light and took this close portrait of Nicole, our model. The key was an SB-24 with a shoot through umbrella to the right of the camera, a simple (and cheap!) yet super effective combo. I normally like my portraits with low-key lighting (Day 35), I'm a sucker for some shadows. I took this tight portrait of Nicole and it looked good but it wasn't anything over the top, the lighting and composition were pretty standard. So I started playing around in photoshop to see what I could come up with. 


I am admittedly terrible with photoshop. I'm slowly getting better because of this project, but I'm still by no means a pro. An easy way to spice up a picture is to use a high-pass filter, so that's usually where I start. Strobist has a great article on this here, you just need to make sure you don't overdo it, otherwise it starts looking way too processed. 

To start, I made two duplicate layers of the original photo. One of them got the high pass filter. I overexposed the other layer, which was on top of the stack, by about 2 and 1/2 stops and set the blending mode to "luminosity". Then I set the blending mode for the high pass layer to "overlay" and adjusted the opacity sliders until I liked what I saw. 


This picture is kind of the antithesis of what I'd normally do. I've noticed that, along with darker low-key lighting, I trend towards warmer colors. Today I went bright and cooled everything down. The cool colors bring out Nicole's eyes and her hair looks great (mom nailed this look). Overall, today was fun and we walked away with some awesome pictures!