Photo Monday: The Model Tasha and The White Backdrop

One of the great inspirations that I've had recently was a chance to observe a shoot conducted by friend, fellow Gilman School grad, and professional photographer, Tim Tadder. If you've not seen his work, check out his site, and look at his portfolio; you have seen his work, but you just didn't know it. Anyway, he and his team are ruthlessly obsessed with image quality. The key thing that I've learned is that great images don't happen at the point of clicking the shutter, they happen way before that split second.  The really hard work is what goes into every worthwhile image capture: lighting, staging, theming, wardrobe, and post-processing.

So, this past past weekend, I shot Tasha, an aspiring model -- and it was another marathon session, resulting in nearly 300 frames over several hours. The goal though was to use many of the things I learned from Tim, and his team, in crafting the best images I can at this stage in my career.

Among the many winners of Saturdays shoot, with a judicious touch of "post" we have images like the result above. I liked shoot "Tash" for a couple of reasons, but mostly because she has good lines, and if I could get her in the right light, and right positioning, there'd be some memorable shots.

For this one, we were in her last series of shots, and I needed something sultry, but classy, so the thought was "jeans and white top," simple, but potentially sexy. Laying her out on the backdrop, I got Tash to give a bit of suggestive arch in her back -- uncomfortable, but definitely a plus, accentuating her curves and giving more energy to the pic with the beautiful "S" curve formed by her torso, hips and butt. This image was captured in full-color with the settings provided above, lit with one studio strobe with dish to the right of the camera focusing on her face and bust, and a big softbox to camera left and behind Tasha, providing some fill.

After capture, a quick trip to Photoshop with the RAW camera data, and it was time to recover some detail in the white top, which you can see along the seam. Once I got the detail back, I adjusted the exposure level down, for some darkening. The image was properly exposed but I wanted some mood so dark was better. Next up, some brightness (down a bit) and contrast changes (bumped up a touch), and a bit of curves adjustment gets the tonality I wanted in this image. Lastly, I sharpened pretty aggressively, because of the white top and white seamless backdrop and I needed some more delineation. And as the french say, "et voilá."

See more of my photographic efforts @ my Flickr site.