How a Picture Evolves

I've had many people ask about the picture of Buddy I posted in the last blog. So, I thought I'd take a minute to let you know how that shot came to be.

I have spent much time reading two important blogs. One is Strobist and the other is David Tejada's blog. I highly recommend both blogs. Anyone can learn much from either site. I will admit that I am guilty of not reading Strobist much anymore. David Hobby was the first though to give me the creative spark that I could actually take a picture with these small pocket-sized light sources. David Tejada gives many more practical tools and applications to use them in. I will be taking a class this upcoming weekend from David T. so I can't wait to learn many new techniques. I will blog about it when I get back.

Now back to the picture of Buddy. I wanted to keep practicing single strobe lighting. I had dragged along a shoot-through umbrella and also had a very beautiful Voice Activated Lightstand and wanted to try and get a nice shot of either Buddy or Punkin in front of the setting sun. After taking more macros of flowers we moved as fast as we could to the Japanese Garden at the Chicago Botanic Gardens, there is always a lot of good spots to shoot there. We quickly moved along the trail and came to a spot next to the river that runs through the Park. In this case Punkin, who is my normal model, was sulking and hiding in the dark. I asked Buddy and he seemed very excited to have his picture taken. I was using the D3 as well as the SU-800. My VAL, was holding an SB-800 and and umbrella (isn't she talented) off of camera left. I also had the Stofen diffuser on top of the SB-800. I found a spot for Buddy to stand to try and frame him and also capture the last of the glow of the setting sun. I got a series of pictures of which this was the best of that bunch. As for one reason (already discussed in a previous blog) and for various other reasons, Buddy is 8 & he doesn't like to sit still, so this is a rare and short-lived opportunity. This is the shot right out of the camera converted to .jpg from Aperture.



From Aperture I round-tripped into Capture NX. The reason I do this is because I love Nik Control Points. Yes I could purchase Viveza from Nik for Aperture for $245, but why when I could get a much more full-featured program and even better control points with using Capture NX. That would normally cost only $189 (a nice savings over Viveza), but I had an upgrade price of ~$119. I am all about saving money. In this case the control points allow you to selectively control anything in the program. Noise Reduction, sharpening and even Nik Color Efex 3.0. I mean anything you might want to do. Truly a remarkable piece of software and I highly recommend it.

When I sized up where I would like to use this program feature, I started with the background. First, I boosted up the setting sun with a Control Point (CP) on that part of the sky. I added some warmth and also some redness. I did a matching CP in the reflection in the water. This allowed them to look similar. Then I did some spot NR on Buddy's face as well as in the sky - I was at ISO 12,800 after all! I only had NR in those areas...that is the advantage of using Capture NX. The next step was to put another CP on Buddy's face to take out some of the redness and boost contrast. After removing the redness, I added back some warmth to give him a nice glow.

After looking at the picture I realized I wanted to get rid of some of the light surrounding him, I wished I had snooted the light while on location, but with CP's I can easily adjust the amount of Brightness. I put 3 or 4 CP's around Tyler in the areas where I felt I needed to bring the Brightness down. After adjusting those CP's down, I got the final effect that you see at the top. This may sound like quite a bit of work, but with Control Points, well it was about 5 minutes (less time than it took to write it out). Everything was targeted and easy.