Jeff Dillon Photography

My ongoing project for 2011 will be to post weekly explorations of some of my photos: Why I took them, how I took them and how I processed them. If nothing else, the practice will help me think through some of my photographic processes and maybe the occasional visitor to this site will find them useful.

This photo may look like a studio image, but it was shot along the edge of the Salton Sea at Bombay Beach. The subject is the stylish young photographer/model Aly Bucholz. The shoot was part of a large group event organized by The SoCal Photography Group, featuring a number of photographers and models of varying experience. The theme was to be post-apocalyptic, not that you could tell from this photo, though Aly was wearing some distinctive makeup.

Aly had also brought along her own props, including a small white vanity table which she set up in the sand a few feet from the edge of the sea. Here’s a wider shot showing the overall scene:

The environment had gone from overcast to sunny during the course of the day and those of us who hadn’t brought battery-powered strobes were trying to enhance our photos with either off-camera flashes or reflected light. I had brought along a 72″x48″ aluminum frame from Calumet with a half-gold reflective cloth strapped on it which provided useful fill light for many backlit shots; I’m not sure whether we were using it during this sequence with Aly. In any case, there wasn’t nearly enough light to expose Aly enough to let me underexpose and therefore darken the background, resultinging in the blue sky and gray lake coming out almost invisibly white.

It wasn’t a terribly interesting photo until I opened it in Lightroom 3 and starting playing around with some development presets — a few made more of the background details pop out, but I only liked the black-and-white treatment.

What I wound up doing with this image (aside from some minor contrast adjustments and the like) I did entirely in Lightroom 3:

• Reducing the exposure about half a stop to regain some detail in the highlights. I also slid Highlight Recovery up to 100
• More important was adding in some blacks and then offsetting that with a touch of Fill Light. I also bumped up the Vibrance about 30 points just because I usually add some, though I’m not sure how much it affects the final image.
• There are a number of ways to make black-and-white photos. One of the old standards is a full desaturation; Lightroom 3 also offers a B&W option that gives you eight color sliders for deciding how much each hue contributes to the mix. What I did was a variant of the two — using the color sliders, which allow you to adjust the Hue, Saturation and Luminance of each color. Slide Saturation to 0 on all of them and you get a black-and-white photo. Slide Saturation to 0 on everything but red and only the red items in the image retain their color. (My apologies to my one-time Photoshop instructor Ryan Even, who forbade his students from making kitschy monochromes where only the rose is red.) Fiddle with the Hue and Luminance for red and you influence whether Aly’s dress, tattoo and lips are deep scarlet or hot pink. Take the color off the subject’s lips or hair by using an adjustment brush with Saturation set to 0.
  Those other colors are still contributing to the image, but mainly in terms of light and dark. Exaggerate pale skin by sliding the orange Luminance toward 100. Darken a blue sky by sliding Aqua and Blue toward 0.
• Cropping to a square format, because the background wasn’t really contributing much sense of the environment. I put Aly and her reflection a little off-center.

The result isn’t necessarily portfolio-worthy, at least, an entertaining photo. I’d have liked a little more atmosphere and a shorter depth of field with focus closer on Aly’s eyes, but I think this treatment, shape and cropping draw in the eye, if only by emphasizing the creativity Aly brought to the shoot.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 9th, 2011 at 6:12 pm and is filed under explainers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.