Going With a Theme of My Own

When I attend a photo shoot with my Ottawa Photography Model Meetup group, there's always a theme.

We've had high-key and low-key meetups, where a model will pose in front of a white background or a black background, with either lots of lighting around them or as little as a single light. These, I think, are my favourite kinds of model shoots.

We've also done some projector shoots, where the model is illuminated only by an image projected onto her. They're another favourite meetup but I've attended two and I think I'm at the been-there, done-that stage.

This year, I attended two meetups with lights and fabrics, where the model wraps herself in various fabrics and we just go from there.

With these themes, we sometimes have clear ideas about the types of images we want to capture. Many of the photographers who attend these meetups have seen a photo that they want to recreate—I've done that, myself—while other times we just have an image in our heads.

I try to always come prepared with at least one or two ideas.

At the last photo meetup that I attended, I arrived without any ideas. I wasn't even sure I'd be able to attend the meetup, as I was recovering from what I thought was a headcold that had also attacked my lungs. I rallied about 24 hours before the meetup and felt good until the next morning, when my sinuses kicked me in the head.

I really hope I didn't pass anything on.

So, when I arrived, I saw some old and new faces, including our model, Riley Jade. The theme of this meetup was Movement and Light, so I expected that we'd be relying on several flashes while Riley danced around—she had brought ballet toe shoes, several flowing skirts and outfits, and scarves.

But I didn't have any expectations or pre-conceived images to work with. I was going to see what ideas other people had and I would come up with something as we worked through this two-hour session.

When Mike, our meetup organizer, selected a black background, I knew that I could shoot for either colour or black-and-white images. When we shoot with a white background, I tend to process most of my photos in black and white because I hate messing with white balancing in post-processing.

Riley showed us a lacey, black leotard and a sheer, white gown, and I told myself that if she wore either, I'd shoot with the intention of creating black-and-white photos. But she also had a purple scarf and an orange skirt, and I thought that those had to be kept in colour.

And that's when I got my idea for what I wanted to capture.

(I've just realized that I have a long setup for what I wanted this post to be about. This is going to be a long post—though there are lots of photos for this Photo Friday post.)

One of the challenges for this shoot is that because Riley was jumping and twirling around a space where the backdrop is only so wide, and because we had so many lights around her, I knew that I'd have to do a lot of post-processing to give myself enough canvas in the final image. And we had a strip light that was constantly getting in my frame.

When Riley put her orange skirt on (and only the skirt, so this post isn't particularly safe for viewing at work), I imagined the final image of a very dark surrounding with just Riley illuminated. Yet, she would be in black and white, while her orange skirt would be the only colour in the final photo.

Here's the RAW image:

Obviously, I needed to eliminate the strip light and the illumination it cast on the backdrop but that wasn't my first task, which was to run the RAW image through a lab tool, in PaintShop Pro, to adjust the exposure and pop the colour of the skirt. I also use this tool to recover blown-out highlights but there were none in this photo, which I shot slightly underexposed to avoid washing out any of Riley's skin.

With the exposure increased by three stops and the colour saturation increased by 15 percent, I was ready to start the serious editing of this shot.

The first task was to remove the strip light and bounced light off of all surrounding objects. The easiest way to do this was to simply paint over them. I chose black and the paint-brush feature and went over all areas with the greatest amount of bleeding light and the objects that weren't part of the photo. I used a fairly large brush size and went around most of Riley, not worrying that there was still some ambient light around her.

I'd fix that in my next few steps.

Next, I increased the contrast in the image by 20 percent. Doing so darkened everything around Riley and eliminated the edges of the stark brushstrokes. The contrast tool also affected Riley but I still had more to do with her.

To ensure that I eliminated everything from the background and to make sure that most of the floor wasn't illuminated, I cast a vignette around Riley.

With Riley now the only focus of the image, it was time to perform more tweaks without worrying about the surrounding space. PSP has a tool, called Smart Photo Fix, that automatically adjusts for exposure, white balance, sharpness, colour saturation, and more, but I never accept the defaults because it tries to compensate for the entire image and that means on a dark image like this one, it brightens the whole area.

I tweaked the settings until I was happy.

The resulting image looked pretty good but I had the idea of converting Riley to black and white whilst keeping her skirt orange. To do this, I first had to apply a mask around the skirt.

This process was a bit tricky because part of Riley's raised leg peeked through the skirt in a couple of spots. PSP has a magic wand that is pretty good about outlining larger areas but not so much for small areas, so I had to manually select the peek-a-boo bits of skin.

With the mask applied, I had to invert the selection. Without inverting the selection, only the skirt would be affected by any changes, and I wanted the opposite.

The next step was to convert the image to black and white. PSP remembers my last settings but every photo requires a different shift in filtering, depending on the colours that are being converted and the skin tones of the subject.

As I stated in another post, I really like applying an infrared affect to my black-and-white photos to give them an added glow, so as soon as I was happy with my black-and-white settings, that's what I did. Happy with that result, I deactivated the mask.

The photo was really coming together but I wasn't done.

Riley, in her slightly bent pose, seemed to me to be a bit too vertical. I wanted to give the impression that she was in motion and couldn't sustain that pose, would fall over if she froze. But I didn't want the angle to be too dramatic: I also had to think about the small bit of light that I had kept at her feet, and too much of an angle would make the floor seem obviously skewed.

Before I could tilt Riley, however, I had to do something first. Depending on how much of a tilt I achieved, there was a risk of her outstretched hand being moved too close to the edge of the frame; or worse, that part of her hand or arm would get cut off.

To work around this, I increased the canvas area. I had started using a similar tool in photos that I have edited with Snapseed, but this PSP tool is faster and better. I created a large, square canvas around Riley, which gave me lot of room to work with.

Using the Straighten tool, I put a small but definite angle on the image. I had to try a couple of times until I was satisfied but I like the result.

Next, I cropped the unwanted space around Riley, though I kind of liked the extra space so I saved a copy of this work. I decided that a 5 x 7 size was good for this photo and I still kept part of the extended canvas in doing so.

I was almost done but I really wanted the orange of the skirt to pop. To get this result, I applied a pre-existing filter over the image.

And I was done. Here's the final saved version.

I took lots of shots of Riley, as she moved around in this bright skirt, and I decided to keep this theme throughout. I'll share those images, next week, for the next Wordless Wednesday (I've typed enough words for today).

Happy Friday!