Jacinta and I have been meaning to work together for a very long time now having known each other from the beginnings of both our careers. So a couple of weeks ago we managed to finally both be in town, and both had a bit of free time, so we made it happen!
I recruited Jacinta to be the new Perth Street Car Magazine feature model which will be in the April issue of the magazine, but on top of that we also had some fun in the pool and got a little creative with gelled speedlights, some smoke and a hose. The photo above is the product of all that. I hope you like it!
THE LIGHTING SETUP:
This particular shot was taken with just 3 lights.
An Elinchrom ‘A’ Head fitted with a 100cm Deep Octa powered by my Elinchrom Ranger RX Speed AS battery pack was my main light. It was positioned front and centre just above the frame of the picture, and about a metre and a half in front of Jacinta.
On the left, level with jacinta was a 430EX Speedlight with an Lumiquest FXtra gel holder and a red gel placed inside. This was set to about 1/8th power. Directly behind Jacinta placed nice and high way out of frame was a Canon 580EXII on about 1/4 power. This 580 had a turquise hel placed over it and was aimed directly down at Jacinta and the water, firing through a beam of water being sprayed by a hose I mounted at the back of the pool.
THE POST PRODUCTION
As per usual I imported the images into Lightroom 3, and made my colour correction and white balance adjustments. I then used a collection to store a few of my favourites, this being one of them(above). So I then exported this image to Photoshop CS5 for some further adjustments.
I used some advanced frequency seperation techniques that I’ve customised to clean up the skin which took very little work on Jacinta. She has beautiful skin with hardly any imperfections. I added the tinest bit of light to her eyes and lips to make them pop. The key with the eyes is to be subtle about it. A little make a big difference. The eyes are one of the most common mistakes photographers make in retouching photos.
I dodged and burned the highlights/shadows respectively for extra contrast and then applied a very gentle colour gradient across the image from left to right to complement the colours from the speedlights in the photo. Red to turqoise. To finish it off I added some sharpening using a special technique with a mask. The mask allowed me to remove too much sharpening from places where I didnt want it such as the skin.
Fairly simple really, but done properly with a model like Jacinta and it turns out just superb!
Definitely more from this set soon!
B.
