LightningPaul

A few weeks a ago I did a fun photo shoot for a few friends. First inside the house but later we went to the beach. We walked on the breakwater till we reached the end our planet :-) She is very cool girl who really likes to pose for the camera.

I really love this image. To me it has so much power, energy, liveness and expression. It looks simple but it has many great elements. Please let me know what you feel.


TECH-INFO: who thought that fish eye lenses are no fun for taking portraits? The distorted perspective gives you lots of new options. I was also standing very very close to here (perhaps 10 cm). I under exposed the ambient light a little bit. I used three lights: the sun at the left, my flash on-camera and a gold reflection screen at the right held by a friend. The sun was the main light. The flash and reflector were fill-in. Another reason for on camera flash was to get higher sync speeds (so over 1/250s) to "overpower" the sun in a few cases. The flash was covered with a 1/4 CTO gel to warm up the light.

Because I really worked hard to get the exposure and white balance right in camera I shot JPGs. The Nikon camera gives really warm and nice skin colors which I adore. Most RAW convertors (except the ones of Nikon like Capture NX) just destroy those colors which are so characteristic. I used DxO Optics Pro for lens and contrast enhancements. Afterwards I used Photoshop to improve the contrasts of different parts and colors even more, and to smoothing the skin. Also the reflections on the sun glasses are removed. I also had to crop a little bit because my food was also slightly in the frame.