At lunch today I wanted to experiment a little at a fast yet affective lighting and camera setup for portraiture.
Well this is what I used and how I used it.
Camera: Nikon D80
Lens: 50mm F1.8
Filter: ND8 (to help with exposure levels, it was bright out, don’t hate me)
Flash: SB-600, (using the built in flash in the camera as a commander unit to trigger the external flash)
Light-Modifier: Westcott-Micro Apollo
Tripod: Giottos MT 9370
While waiting for my friend, I setup my tripod, camera and flash with modifier. I preset the exposure to 2 stops under. At this point my friend co-worker and fellow photographer Jim showed. I had him stand out around 5 to 6 feet from the lens and to the left of center of frame. A few exposures to dial in the flash power and position then began creating a few proper exposures, while I continued to work with the position in relation to the subject (Jim) until I came up with something close to what I was looking for. Since this was a short, fast experiment at lunch. I didn’t want to spend too much time fine tuning the image. The point of this experiment was to see what kind of image I could create in a short bare bones time frame.
Well this is the last image in the line of exposures. I am posting both the RAW unedited as well as an edited version of the final exposure. Hope you enjoy.
Jim in the RAW!
Jim in the edit.
What I did, I created 2 adjustment layer one for Levels and one for Curves. Adjusting lightness, color and contrast. On a 3rd layer I used the clone tool to take out highlight hot spots, a few blemishes and a stray hair or two. Then I made a 4th layer as an additional adjustment layer to modify the levels again and then isolate the modification to the eyes only to brighten his eyes just a touch. Just like when I created the exposure I didn’t want to spend a lot of time editing. Oh and I cropped the image to slightly reframe and create a more pleasing composition. I could have spent more time taking out the wrinkles and smoothing the skin tones, and on and on. Well this is how it turned out, not too bad for a 5 minute or so …. portrait.
Let me know what you think. I really would like some feed back, I am always looking to improve and to grow as a photographer. Thanks
I like the brightness of Jim’s eyes in the edited version. Very sharp.
Thanks, yeah I was pretty happy with how it turned out.
Great. I also tried to do this in my 20 portraits project. I tried to make them as fast as I could with minimum equipment. A flash and an ND8 is all what I usually needed.