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Ugh. It¬†took a week to get to my shots from last Wednessday’s studio shoot. Well, not quite true. On the weekend I did the collage of Alex and the poster of Whitney. Last night I got through the rest of the images. I had to get the images onto CD’s to give back to people today. Here are some of the images from that shoot.

 

 

 

There are more in my portrait flickr set.

So today is the last of these classes. They have been a lot of fun, and I have learned a lot. I need to keep this up. There are some more things that I would have liked to have looked at more. We didn’t play with lighting ratio’s much. I would have been nice to set the lights, take a picture, change the lights, take a picture, etc. I might need to just spring for my own set to be able to do that.

I was shooting at my studio class and noticed that some people were taking pictures of Whitney jumping. Whitney leads her cheer group, so she is a natural at this kind of thing. We weren’t really set up for this kind of shoot. We were doing head shots before.

We had a gray muslin background, and the background light was too low and not configured correctly. I would have rathered it had a regular reflector pointing higher at the background. The background wasn’t really high enough either. To change the angle, I stood on a riser, and held my camera above my head. This way I wouldn’t have Whitney’s hands above the background.

We had to photogenics strobes in softboxes at 45deg to her that we had set up for portraits before. They still seemed to cover her well enough.

So I thought that I had a pretty good shot, but I wanted to so something with it. I didn’t like the background, and I needed a way to hide the light, so I decided to cut her out of the background.

This was harder than I thought. Well, actually just time consuming. The quick selection tool was horrible. It kept selecting parts of her. I then tried the magic wand. That was a little better, but there was still much to do. I then spent quite a bit of time with the other selection tools adding and subtracting from my selection.

Once I had her selected, I feathered the edge a few pixels, and then coppied her onto a blank layer. Another layer with a fill of white, and we were almost done.

When I looked at the edges of her legs, there was a bit of a grey line beside her jeans that didn’t look right. I replaced that grey with white. That looked much better.

Then I had an issue with her hair. I managed to “erase” some of her hair (actually did it with a mask) on the right side of her head. But, I am still not sure what to do about the grey that is still between her hair on the left side of her hair. I am sure that would show if printed.

So that wasn’t too bad, and was really what I had started out to do, but now that I had her seperated from the background, could I put her on a different background?

I looked through some older images and found one that was mostly clouds and sky. I then created another image with this sky, and added Whitney in as another layer. Because she was feathered when I cut her out, she placed pretty well on top.

Then, I expanded the canvas to give lots of space around the image. I added a drop shadow to the cloud layer and added the text at the bottom.

Voila. Cheezy poster.

I missed posting for a few days. It is time for the next studio class, and I am just getting to putting up some pictures from the last class!

I got the chance to use my Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 lens. That thing is very nice. I liked that I was able to stand back a bit and not be on top of the model. I had taken some pictures before with my 55-200, but these turned out sharper. I wish I could remember exactly what type of lighting we were doing with each of the models. Some of the lighting techniques woked better than others. I have some of the images turned into prints to bring to class tomorrow. The “models” in the photos are others from the class. The people that were supposed to sit in the chair didn’t show up.

I am psyched. Today is the second day of my studio lighting class. The class is going to be down at the instructor’s studio. He is bringing in live models, and we will be using his strobes. He has some radio triggers (pocket wizards I think) that he is planning to use. He will have the recievers set up on the lights, and just hand us the transmitter when it is our turn. I will have more about the evening later.

I just got back from my first studio lighting class. It wasn’t too bad. We just went over equipment, so we didn’t get into any real detail. Next class is when the fun starts and we get to set up lights and shoot pictures of a model.

The class is through continuing education, with this class at Jefferson High in Uptown. The instructor is Gil Dignen, and he seems to be a great guy. I have signed up for the intro and the advanced course that follows it, so I have 9 weeks total I think.

A cool thing about the class is that we are going to go to his studio for the next 3 classes (at least), and he will be bringing in a real model that he works with. This should be a lot of fun.