Pin Pin Apparel

Pretty much all I did today was test and shoot photos for Leah from Pin Pin Apparel. Pin Pin is a local clothing company that has some awesome designs!

 I went out with Victor to Lime Kiln and tested lighting set ups and locations for about two hours. We found these awesome spots by a lake that we thought were really cool. The lighting took a while, but we eventually came up with some designs that we thought would work really well. And the locations were awesome.

And so naturally, when we met up with Leah and the models, Vanessa and Fiona, we didn't use any of the locations Victor and I originally scouted! But that's just what happens every time so I wasn't too surprised.  Either the lighting set up or locations you scout will have to be thrown out as soon as you start shooting, so just get used to thinking on your feet and making it look like you know what you're doing!

Luckily for us, Leah took the directorial role for the day and took care of picking most of the locations and posing the models. She pretty much stood next to me as I was shooting and we she made most of the decisions on what the model needed to tweak and if the background was working. I was left to concentrate on making sure the lighting was spot on and correct as this was the only time we would have shoot. Thanks Leah for taking that director role! Made life a lot easier!

Speaking of posing and models, I really don't know what the big deal is with models supposedly being hard to work with. Maybe we got lucky or something but Vanessa and Fiona we incredibly easy to work with and just awesome models in general! Both looked great right off the bat with every clothing change and it was really just a process of tweaking lighting and posing to get it just right. They both could do pretty much exactly what we were trying to tell them to do with out much explanation, and we never had to wait for them to find a good pose or take a break. Every time I put the camera to my face they were ready to go and I never had to wait at all. It was also chilly out where we were and we shot for about 5 hours and nobody once complained about anything. At all. I think that's a first. So thank you Vanessa and Fiona for being great to work with and awesome models in general!

So now for the tech talk....

Lighting. For tonight picture, I used two strobes. One was on a stand and shooting through a white umbrella to make nice, soft light. This was the key light. The fill light was a strobe bounced off of my big reflector on it's gold side. This filled the shadow in with a nice, warm light. It was a bit of a challenge getting the reflector to stay balanced on my tripod, but we eventually tied it on with a inner tube I had in my car.

This image really came together in the editing. Here's the raw picture right from the camera.

Pretty good. Almost could work right out of the camera. But could be better. In Lr I played with the tone curve, dropping the shadow reds, raised the greens a bit, and raised the blues in the shadows a bit. I also cropped the image. Upped the exposure and contrast, as well as adding some blues to the shadows. 

 In Ps, added two light leaks downloaded from the web, set them to screen and lower opacity. A quick curves to darken the shadows a bit, then a texture overlay to darken the lower left and add some, well, texture. Then I finally went in and sharpened, then smoothed her face with the paint mixer brush and removed from blemishes. Didn't need or do much.

I'm going fast because one of my HD fried and I need to go recover the data hopefully.

Here's the final image.

See you tomorrow!