Photoshoot Sarah - 7th November 2011

Just finished editing some photographs from a shoot with Sarah which I did the other week and thought it was about time I updated my blog. Things have been very hectic just lately and I have got behind with everything and my list of things to do on my office desk seems to be growing at an exorbitant rate. I have some Annual Leave left to take before Christmas so think I will take some time off the day job to try and catch up and clear the backlog before Christmas.

Anyway less of my ramblings and back to the shoot in question. Sarah it turns out only lives about 10 minutes away from me and after some initial discussions discovered she wanted to try something along the Sin City line as in the film. I had done a couple of images before in this style and in my collection of props I have some guns and swords which we could use.  Sarah wanted to wear a Black PVC catsuit for these images which I thought could work well, but advised her we needed to include red somewhere in the clothing else the whole Sin City theme would not work. So Sarah turned up for the shoot with a red scarf and gloves which I believe she had purchased just for the shoot.

I used a very simple set-up for these shots against a black background, and one light to the side of Sarah with a large octagonal softbox with a grid on it to ensure the light only fell where I wanted it to. Also I had a fan going to get some movement in the hair.

We very quickly got the shots we needed to take into post production and then did a few other sets to create some images Sarah could use in her modelling portfolio.

In post production I did my normal tidying up of the images removing any skin blemishes, sharpening of the eyes etc. I try not to over edit the skin of the models as very quickly it can look very false and sometimes not even look like the model anymore so I like to try and keep it very natural.  Once this stage was complete I went through my large collection of images I use for backgrounds as it was important for this to work for the background to be buildings as if the image was taken outside on the street. Once I had added the background I selected the red elements of the image as in the gloves and scarf and jumped these onto a separate layer to bring back into the image later.

I then turned the whole image black and white, for this I use the Nik Silver Efex Pro filter in Photoshop which is the best Black & White conversion filter I have come across. It has massive flexibility in the conversion process and even allows selective editing of parts of the image by adding control points. I had previously created a preset for this Sin City type look which is very much like a Film Noir look and used this as my starting place and then just did some minor adjustments.

Once the image was looking right in black and white I then copied the layer with the gloves and scarf above this layer and then just did some minor contrast adjustments.

Now Blog complete it’s back to more editing before going off to the Cinema this evening to watch the new Twilight Film which my wife is a massive fan of.