So today I went for a portrait...of an eye. I've done a few of these in the past and they are super fun to play around with. The trick is lighting the eye bright enough with out blowing out the highlights on the face.
Sadly, today I didn't have enough time to do a proper set up, so it required a lot of post in Lr to make it into what I wanted.
The original photo what a full head shot, but I cropped it down to what you see. The other side of the face way in complete shadow and it just work with it in the photo. Somehow, the cropped version is still incredibly sharp and free of noise. This is maybe 1/8th of the size of the original photo so you'd expect it to be a bit fuzzy. But it's not.
I was using my 50mm (looove that lens) at f8, ISO 100, and 1/30. I was going for the same technique as yesterday of freezing action with the strobe then filling in shadow with ambient light. There is a soft box 3 with a 560ex III of the the right at 1/32 power, and a bare 560ex III in my left hand pointed straight up at 1/16 power. The ceiling acts a giant diffuser and fills in some shadows left by the soft box. I was using f8 to make sure the entire eye and eyelash were in perfect focus. The 50 is an incredibly sharp lens so I wanted to take advantage of that. Shooting at lower apertures makes it difficult to focus and doesn't have great results anyway.
In Lr I did a ton of work. First, I brushed across the eye and did some enhancing on it. Contrast up, clarity up, exposer up a bit, saturation up A LOT. Next I went across the rest of the frame and lowered the saturation to almost nothing, lowered the highlights, upped the contrast, and dropped the clarity a lot. I then went across the highlights again and smashed them down a bit more. Finally, I went around some areas around the nose and check and lowered the clarity a lot to soften things up. This was to make the eye the only thing that would attract attention based on focus. Apart from the eye brow. That would just stay sharp.
That's about it really, I did some minor little cropping tweaks and overall adjustment but they were very minor (as in bump exposer +1.)
That's all for today, see you tomorrow.
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