Well, we are into whatever day of this self isolation and are starting to look for new things to do. For me, I decided to update my profile picture on my Linkedin page, it was somewhat out of date.

The light coming into my studio was lovely and bright. Afternoon spring sunshine light. I decided I would use this light source as start. Setting my studio up I began with a black cloth background clamped tautly to my Manfrotto Autopoles and expanding background support pole.

I then clamped my Lastolite reflector opposite the light source, gold side outwards. Set my camera up on a tripod and set an exposure of 125th at f5.6 @ISO 400. Focused on the point where I was going to stand, set the self timer and off we went.

The first exposure was satisfactory (No.1) but not quite what I was looking for. So I moved the reflector to about 45˚ from me and tried again.

A slight improvement but still lacking the image I was after (No. 6). So I added a single flag unit to the scenario. I attached a Nikon SB5000 Speedlight on a stand and angled it towards the reflector so the light would bounce back towards me. The power output was eventually set to 1/16th, it started at 1/256th. This flash would group ‘A’. With Nikon SB-5000 and the WR-10 and WR-A10 adaptor you can create a wireless system that enables you to group flashes into 6 groups of 18 flashes per group (but only if your Joe McNally)!

However, the light coming in via the window was a little to strong and causing the right hand side of my face to burn out a bit. The light needed to be diffused, so I stuck pages from a newspaper over the relevant parts of the window with gaffer tape. This bought the highlight back into control. (No.9)

I introduced a second Speedlight on the right of the camera, group ‘B’. This unit was mounted on my Avenger ‘C’ stand in the Manfrotto Hotrod strip softbox. The power output was set to 1/128th. Both flash units were about 3ft away from me. I then flipped the reflector to use its white side. The ISO was reduced to ISO 200 and after a brief use of a comb and tidy up, I assumed a pose and got my portrait (No.21)

The images were downloaded into Adobe Lightroom and a series of adjustments were made to my chosen RAW file image. I always shoot RAW as it offers the greatest flexibility to the image file and Lightroom is a none destructive programme, meaning you can return to the original settings no matter what you have done to the file. However, when you download images into Lightroom it removes the settings set by your camera, in this case an underexposed original file, even though you had everything correct in the camera. The image you see on the view screen is a jpeg, so I knew the image was still viable.

My first adjustment is nearly always sharpening and lens profile corrections. The main adjustment was to the curves, sliding it to the left to bring up the brightness and the adding a small ’S”’ curve. I then made some adjustments in the basic panel to the highlights, whites and contrast. As well as the clarity and texture sliders. With most images, I’m feeling my way around them and I will just make wild adjustment’s just to see what happens and then slowly bring it back to zero. The image was then converted to black and white and I added a bit of a split tone added.

However, my main bugbear with the image was the highlight on my hand. This needed a little more retouching than Lightroom could offer. I exported the image to Photoshop and created a duplicate layer which I set to screen mode. I then worked on the highlight area using the spot healing brush. The opacity of the layer was reduced to lessen the effect, flattened and saved. This process returns a Tiff file which I then gave a few tweak’s, a bit of spotting and a voilá.

Prior to photoshop

Final Image

Blog - "Musings from a small room"

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