Another capture from the photoshoot last weekend with Electronic Alternative trio Nedry.
This was the first set up of the day and was based around a theme I was working on as part of an album-art concept.
It has been the hardest one to develop so far, but I think I have got somewhere I am happy with. You know when your friend says to you, oh I have just spent hours in Photoshop on this image, but when you look at it you think, really?
It’s like that.
We had not been able to get to the location for the exact time we wanted, partly due to changing it the night before from south to north London, plus it was throwing it down big style when I woke up in Brighton. Then there were some train issues and it all went into panic mode. Adding to the excitement was the fact that we had to semi break-in as the groundsmen had not got there early enough to unlock the gates.
Eventually I found an area I wanted to work in and starting ‘pruning’ the surrounding landscape.
Being single handed really blighted me on this shoot. With another pair of hands I would have used a reflector as mentioned in the doorway shoot to just slightly reduce the shadows, I wanted the hard edges but it would have been nice to even them out.
There was a Nikon Speedlight (SB800), mounted on-camera at 1/8 power with the zoom head set to 24mm. This has helped pop the foreground and give a bit of extra depth the woodland surroundings.
The actual shoot process was quite straight forward, and once I had got a few frames in we moved onto the other locations.
Even so, there were a few areas of the images I had whittled down to which were not as I would like and needing fixing. It was so frustrating, as it was verging on in-camera perfection.
I do all my cataloguing and initial cleaning in Adobe Lightroom. I made a final decision on which image to work on and created a new virtual copy. Every time I do a shoot I find another part which I have a use for. Of real note this time around was the Graduated Filter in the developer module.
Using this gave me the ability to recover the balance across the image as the treeline was too prominent due to the heavy daylight by applying it downward to the horizon (around eye-level of the subjects) with a slight reduction on the Brightness fader.
Normally I would tweak colour and contrast in Lightroom, this time however, I chose to do it all in Adobe Photoshop.
The key pointers here are that I have used several selective colour layers. 1 to balance the green tones of the surroundings, 1 to reduce the red skin tones in the subject on camera right and another to balance the pink tones in the girls dress.
The final pointer here was that despite it being a perfect image the girl decided at that moment to look away from the camera (probably another butterfly). Quickly resolved with the use of the incredibly powerful Liquify filter. Taking a slice from a duplicate layer which just seperated the eyes, I was able to use Liquify to just repoint the pupils to be looking dead on.
Here is the original image for comparison.
Original photo before processing
