Lighting on location... or not

Had our first shoot last night in my "Lighting on Location" class, and our very own Tri-Community student Tiffany was our model. We busted out the Westcott Apollo 28" softbox and the wireless triggers in a parking lot and shot away. Our first set up was against an aluminum door:

After this set, we moved Tiffany to include some more ambient light and environment. While the students were using the flash set up, I was shooting available at ISO 6400, f/4, at 1/40 sec. Her face was lit with a torchlight mounted on a stand that the students were using to lock focus.

Just a couple of slight adjustments in Lightroom 3, essentially a light sharpening, a medium contrast curve, and a saturation/color adjustment brush on the face and hair. I like the way these came out.

The last week of school!

WooHoo! This is the last week of school!

For all my classes this week, we will be doing review, and having fun. For my Wednesday and Thursday classes, we will be having potluck. Please make sure you bring something. We need drinks, snacks, munchies, pizza, etc. If you bring soda, please make sure you bring some cups.

And it's your last chance to turn in images. Make sure you bring them in.

The last couple of days have not beeb great for shooting. We got a break today, And had some good light. I had the opportunity to work with Carmen again (my Thursday class knows Carmen). We went out to my not so secret anymore spot in Duarte. Got lucky too, the river was flowing. Carmen is a lot of fun to work with, and is game for wearing 4" heels, and standing on rocks in the middle of the lake. I haven't had a chance to go through all of them, but here are a few from today. All images were shot with the Canon 5D MKII and the 70-200 f/2.8 IS

This first shot was taken with the Westcott Apollo 28" softbox. All the rest of the images were available light, except where noted. Read more

Some days are easier than others

Some days are definately easier than others. Take yesterday for instance. When I left the house at 11, it was pretty gloomy outside and sprinkling. When I got to West Hollywood to do this shoot, it was beautiful. The gorgeous couple you see posted in this blog are Brian and Michelle. I stumbled into them quite by accident. One of my students asked if I could assist her on an engagement shoot. She is in my wedding class, and we have been discussing engagement shoots for awhile. Now while I normally don't take up

many offers to assist, she assured me that this couple would be worth it. Boy was she ever right!

Thanks for letting me Tag along Jennifer.


Now the amazing thing about this couple, was that they were both prepared and ready for a great day of shooting. Outfits choosen, hair and make-up done, manicured, had several locations already scouted. Made the day easy. It is also refreshing to work with a guy who had ideas for how he wanted his images, and they both took direction well. Not your typical stiff couple.

A little about the work flow here. I typically don't use Lightroom much, normally all Photoshop, with all the blemish removal and things that are normally required when you are working with non-model types and no professional make-up artists. But as I was reviewing the images and making my selects (in Lightroom, which makes this process easy) I realized I wouldn't have to do a lot of post process work. This allowed me to play with some presets I wanted to try, which you see here.




One of the main reasons I don't often use Lightroom is because of 1 of it's strengths. It makes changing things like exposure or whitebalance to a large group of images at once very easy. But as a typically outdoor location shooter or wedding shooter, I don't often have a large group of images I can adjust all at once.

I normally have to tweak individual images seperately.





Almost all the images you see here were done by using some free presets I found on the web. If you have Lightroom, do a search for free Lightroom presets. You will come up with a lot, and some of them are excellent. Here is a good starting point:

http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/

and:

http://www.ononesoftware.com/detail.php?prodLine_id=33


Of course, even doing this, I still always finish everything in photoshop, that's is where I do my final cropping, sharpening, and image sizing for various outputs. I normally live in photoshop, but with this particular shoot, I was able to make my selects, and edit them down to 68 final images, and have them burned to a cd in about 3 hours utilizing both Lightroom and Photoshop. Unheard of, and my wife and kids are thankful I will be able to go play with them today.

On a street in West Hollywood. Available light, cloudy day didn't hurt

















A random wood door found on Santa Monica Blvd. Available light






























Michelle and Brian have a friend that owns a club. They allowed us to shoot inside before the club opened. 1 Alien Bee shot though a beauty dish, and a 1/15 sec shutterspeed to get some light on the bottles.
























Available window light in a very dark club


















Brian was very particular about this yellow dress, he wasn't a fan. But I think we made it work in this image.









I love this shot. I had to shoot this because she looked so cute standing on the brick to help us get a good shot. Michelle is just a tiny bit of a girl.

Coming up this week in class:

Monday Star Wars shoot

Wednesday perhaps we will cover teh workflow for this shoot

Thursday, does anyone have a couple that wants to come in and shoot?

See you in class,
Frank