Adolfo

Adolfo, a photo by killy on Flickr.

I kinda forced it this evening. I really didn't have time to do this, but i'm glad i did. I had been wanting to set up the beauty dishes and get to know them.

I was supposed to have a friend over today to play around in the garage, but the day got away from me. Had to complete a project that took me longer than i expected; then, i had to head to the other side of town to do yardwork at my aunt's house (again).

We didn't make it back home till nearly 7:00 or so and everyone was just tired. Luckily for me, exhaustion makes for good drama.

Took this in the garage with small beauty dish with Vivitar 285HV, camera right as my key light. I had it set up with the diffuser on it and no grid, which i REALLY wish i had. I always spill onto my background. I had the large beauty dish with my sb-600 behind me and up high as a fill light, bare. I had a Vivitar 285HV with my DIY black straw grid behind behind him and pointed at the wall. Oh, and one other small detail: Had a +2 close up filter on my Sigma 24-70.

Post-processing was as follows: RAW file brought into ACR where i set Recovery to about 50 to get just a bit of my highlights back and set the saturation down to about -30. Not much else. Once open in Photoshop i added a black and white layer and set that to hard mix and dropped the opacity to 50%. then, i added a curves layer and very gently pulled down the highlights and dropped only the deepest blacks.

Lesson learned: I need a flag to stop spilling light everywhere. I'm a mess.