Shutterbug Strasse

Posted by Doc B. (M) on May 27, 2005 at 08:59:25

In Reply to: Ahhh you've revived me- she can be our shot of the week every week. posted by Joe M on May 27, 2005 at 07:31:33:

Thanks Joe, those are some excellent tips I will certainly try. Re the colors - Jacqui was so proud of herself that she wore green shoes to go with the Altec green. Made me feel bad to have to tell her it was just going to be a head shot.

Re the sleeves, you have me chuckling. Note that this is the first shot of a female model on my website in which she is wearing anything more than a pair of shoes. We talked about doing a shot without the shirt, but Jacqui will also be using the shot on her site and wasn't sure what the audience reaction would be. Now that we have the shot it's pretty obvious that a little bare shoulder wouldn't have shaken anyone up too much. Maybe next time.

Re the soft focus, my solution to shooting women as opposed to girls ;^)> is the Dynamic Skin Softener in Nik Color Fx Pro. It's a rather amazing plugin that does a superb job of blending skin tones while preserving the rest of the shot. I wanted to keep a nice crisp look to the tatty Altec so I think it worked quite well. I've seen a lot of photos of Jacqui and I knew that she would look best if I had her looking slightly up at the camera to open her eyes up a bit. Those beautiful blues pop out nicely, I think, especially after I sharpened them just a bit. I also took the color temp just a bit to the warm side to bring out the skin tones without messing up the black background or the Altec green. And I had to use the healing tool on a hotspot on her left elbow.

I've seen a lot of shots done with the Nikon soft focus filters and they do look really nice. Will get one and give it a try sometime. I think we risk losing the audience here (anybody left besides me and Joe?) if we just talk about throwing money at these projects, so I'll mention that one can get a nice softening effect by stretching a black stocking over your lens if you don't have a soft filter or fancy plugins for Photoshop. A perfectly servicable shot could have been made with some halogen worklamps, and some white fabric, and a $400 digital camera. I did our website shots that way for several years before getting the the bug for fancier gear.