Click to enlarge

Last week I participated in a “Models and Photographers” Meetup event where I took the photo at left. If you’re an aspiring photographer, or even a pro looking to meet new models or experiment with new techniques, I highly recommend using Meetups (www.meetup.com) as a low-cost, low-stress way to get out in the field and work with like-minded people.

In my city there are at least a dozen photography Meetup groups, many of which hold events at least once per week. Some Meetups charge a small fee to help cover administrative costs, but usually everyone involved is working for trade to build their portfolios (called TFP).  At last week’s meetup I found half-a-dozen would-be models and a similar number of photographers all working hard to create great images together with no financial pressure, and no expectations except that any good photos would be provided to the model afterward.

My photo above got some attention from the group, because other photographers who shot the same model in the same location did not get equally good results. They asked me to explain how I made the shot, and I happily obliged (sharing our techniques is one purpose of this group).  I thought you might enjoy the explanation as well.

This was shot with natural light in the mid-afternoon, with sunlight striking the model directly from the high left side of the frame.  I usually try to avoid direct sunlight on a model’s face, because it’s too harsh, but we were shooting fast and I couldn’t get a better position, so I worked with it.  I had an assistant holding a silver reflector at camera right to bounce in some fill light.

Unretouched original - Click to enlarge

Back at home, after importing the photo to Lightroom, my first concern was the harsh sunlight on the model’s face. (See the original, un-retouched photo nearby.) This kind of hard, raking light is almost always unflattering, and the model deserved better treatment.  After all, it’s my job as the photographer to put her in flattering light, not her job to be flawless in harsh light.

So, to correct for the hard light, before doing anything else I decided to apply some softening to her skin. I took the photo from Lightroom to Photoshop and applied what I call “glam blur” softening to her skin.  (I won’t detail the process here because I cover it in both my headshots course and my Photoshop course.)

After that softening, I returned the photo to Lightroom, where I increased the Exposure and Fill Light slightly, then increased the Blacks to regain lost contrast.

I wanted to crop in fairly tight, because this photo is all about the expression on the model’s face.  But I also wanted to keep enough of her clothing and body to make an interesting composition, and I wanted enough of the railing to keep the interesting triangular effect, so that set the boundaries of my crop.

Finally, since the background was a boring gray wall, I applied a slight vignette to de-emphasize the wall and bring the focus forward to the model.

This all took just a few minutes in Lightroom and Photoshop, but it made a huge difference in the final photo, which now looks like something planned and created, rather than just another snapshot.

That was just one of several worthwhile shots I got from this Meetup, not to mention spending a few fun hours with other photographers and models. An afternoon well spent.

And if you don’t have any Meetups like this in your area yet—anyone is free to create one and become an organizer. Even you.

CLICK TO ENLARGE --- Bliss Dance, sculpture by Lloyd Taylor

Some people think of photographic post-production (especially if the word “Photoshop” is used) as synonymous with trickery—as an underhanded way of creating something fake, of “doctoring” a photo, like some supermarket tabloid cover featuring Gary Coleman partying in a hot tub with an extra-terrestrial. Sure, you can do that with Photoshop.

But for most of us photographers, post-production is not some diabolical plot to create something fake, but a useful tool to help us re-create what we saw in reality but were unable to capture in the camera.  Or sometimes what we saw in our mind’s eye as the potential shot, if not for the unfortunate accidents of poor weather, bad lighting, or fat tourists.

It’s a tool to help re-create the shot that should have been.

The photo on this page is a good example.

CLICK TO ENLARGE - Before Editing

This was an awe-inspiring metal sculpture standing alone in the vast, beautiful openness of the desert. At various times, I saw it in glorious sunset or sunrise light, sometimes with stunning clouds, sometimes in a dust storm, sometimes with people at its feet, sometimes standing all alone.

In the best of those moments it was breathtakingly beautiful. Unfortunately none of my photos managed to combine all of the best elements.  In some shots the light was good. In others the sky was good. In others, there were no people cluttering the shot. And so on.

But I want my final photo to express the way it really felt to be there, caressed by a warm desert breeze, gazing up at this marvelous work of art against the beautiful backdrop of nature.

The only way I can recreate that experience is by editing one of my unsatisfactory photos into something that looks more like the real thing and which conveys that feeling.

In this case, I chose a photo where I liked the position of the camera and the angle of the light, because those are fundamentals that can’t be altered.

From that foundation, I did the following:

1. Create a Curves Adjustment Layer to increase the contrast and saturation in the entire image.  This makes the scene look more like what I saw with my eye, which is so much more sensitive than my camera.

2. Remove the leaning ladder and the open access hatch (where the sculptor had climbed inside to work), because these were temporary obstructions in this shot, not indicative of the way the piece usually looked.

3. Remove distracting people and clutter on the ground by using the clone stamp tool to copy bits of the photo from one place to another. (Of course, I kept one human figure for scale.) This helped show the sculpture the way I often saw it, standing alone on a vast desert plain. By doing this I hoped to stir in the viewer the strange and beautiful sense of lonely drama the real scene stirred in me.

4. Finally, after selecting and masking the sculpture with a Layer Mask, I did another Curves Adjustment Layer, this time affecting only the sky, revealing color and detail that my eyes could see, but my camera could not.

The result is the “After” photo shown here.

While some may consider this kind of work to be fakery, trickery, cheating—a good argument could be made that it’s exactly the opposite, because the final result here is a much more accurate representation of the way this sculpture looked and felt to me in person.

Which is more real? The literal truth of a fleeting moment captured by a relatively insensitive and limited recording device—or my best attempt at enhancing that unsatisfactory snapshot to reveal the deeper truth of what it was like to actually be there?

Feel free to leave your opinion in the comments.

By the way, this photo is one of the case studies in my Photoshop Basics course, where over the span of a 20-minute video lesson, you can follow along as I go through the entire editing process described above, if you’re interested in seeing how that sort of thing is done.

For me, this feature alone was worth the $99 upgrade from Lightroom 2. And it’s just one of many improvements. If you want to buy me a beer, use one of the links below when you buy or upgrade.

Click Here for Lightroom 3 at Amazon.com

Upgrade from Lightroom 2 to 3 at Amazon.com