Alex and His Mom

Wasn't sure what I was going to shoot tonight, but then Alex's mom wanted to get a shot of her and her son, so I jumped at the chance to get them a good portrait and get my blog out of the way at the same time!

Unfortunately, it was horrible lighting. Just after sunset, during blue hour. Which can be great actually, but I think they wanted more warm tones, especially since the backyard has some awesome colors in it. So what did I do? I made my own little patch of sunlight of course!

I stuck a strobe up really high (8ft) and pointed it down into the bushes behind the scene. I also gelled it a light orange color to mimic the later afternoon sun. It's not perfect, but at the angle it was it threw some nice shadows and awesome sunlike highlights. Plus, it gave a wonderful side light on Alex and his mom's face, which really helps sell everything.

As for lighting the people, I used a strobe with a warmish gel on it and an umbrella just to camera left of the people, and a reflector just to camera right. This gave the softest light I could, while also being a little warmer. Maybe the light is reflecting off a shiny window or something? That's kind of what I'm going for. This strobe was at 1/16 power I think, and I was shooting at f3.2. The background light was at 1/8 power. Very bright, like the sun!

For exposure, I under exposed the background by two stops. This gave me a really nice base of cool, late evening tones to work with and to build my light around. Effectively, I've split toned the image. By shooting in blue hour, I've made all the shadows blueish, and then brought in warm light for the highlights and subject. I shot at 1/15 of a second, so there's a little bit of blurring going on in the background and around their faces, which helps soften things a bit.

For editing, I did two vignettes that were opposite of each other, kinda. One was to brighten up the faces, and one was to darken the edges. For the face one, I bumped the exposure, highlights, and shadows a bit. Not much. Then I made a local adjustment and did that again, as well as reducing the clarity on their skin to give it a smoother look. I couldn't get as soft a light as I wanted, so post had to do to make that happen. For the edge darkening, I raised the contrast, lowered the shadows, and upped the saturation. Standard vignette plus adding in a bit of color.

That's it folks, really quick portrait, but I think with really good results! If I could get more lights to soften up their faces a bit, that would be nice, but I only had the two. Maybe next time!

See you tomorrow!