Flower Man

Back on the island! Finally. I was considering doing a landscape thing or a picture of my house or something, but that's not reallyyyy what it means to be home.

So instead I had Victor go jump into flowers. :)

He attacked them when we first got to my house, and I thought it would be perfect. Normally, when you smell flowers, you are very gentle and tender and everything. So jumping into them at full speed and basically eating them would be quite a startling image. Or at least that's the hope.

To set this up, I used two gelled strobes. The front light was on an umbrella and gelled a light orange. The second or backlight was gelled light purple and was bare. The goal of this set up was to have a nice, warm tone with soft light in the front and and hard rim light.

I shot with a 70-300mm lens at 140mm and f5.6, so the strobes were set at pretty high power. Can't remember exactly but it something like 1/2 and 1/32. I had to back up and stand on some steps to get the right angle. If I shot from my height I would get the weird distortion and not see his face because I would be looking up. By getting at his angle, I get the action head on.

Timing this took some effect. I actually ended up holding the camera upside down from the way I usually do so that I could have both eyes open. This takes some practice to use both your eyes to time a photo when one eye is looking through a lens. I would be able to generally frame the image, lock focus, then watch Victor run up with one eye. When he started showing up in the frame, I started to take the picture. The natural lag that you have will result in the picture being taken much later than you thought you took it. I got pretty lucky with this shot, I haven't done this type of photo in a while so I was kinda rusty on my timing skills.

To edit this, I did much the same thing as yesterday's picture. I adjusted the tone curved to make the blacks a dark shade of grey, darken the shadows, and raise the highlights. I raised the reds in the lighter tones, and added blues to the darker tones. Green was added to just the highlights.

Next, I warmed the image and toned it a bit purple. I raised the exposure, highlights and shadows, as well as the vibrance. I took an adjustment brush and raised the clarity and saturation of the plants and flowers around Victor. I also darkened his jacked and added a vignette to the image.

Finally, I added a bit of blue to the shadows of the image to give it more color.

Overall, I gave the picture a toned, washed out look. Not quite vintage but along that styles lines.

See you tomorrow!