A Few More Models

If you have not yet read my blog post on Crombie McNeill's workshop at the Aylmer Marina, then you might want to have a look at that now. We had approximately 10 photographers and 9 models from Barrett Palmer Models, a wonderful ratio if you wanted the opportunity to learn how to interact with and even pose a model.

I certainly enjoyed every minute of it. And I have since processed numerous images using all sorts of techniques I've learned over the years and even a few I picked up in the classic book "Skin" by Lee Varis.

One thing I had not done is experiment a bit with changing hair color, so I thought I'd give that a try on an image I have of Charlotte on the stairs at the Symms Museum. This image ended uyp looking exactly how I had hoped, with her hair somewhat sculpted by the highlights I added. I quite like the look.


Then I thought I could try the same on Anik, with one of the images I captured at the Gazebo in the park. However, these images are quite dark and I am not thrilled with the nature of the light (shades) nor am I happy with the color. And that's saying a lot considering that I am one of the more color-blind people on the planet, according to Dr. Watson, my previous ophthalmologist.

Anyway ... I decided ot fix the situation by streaking the hair, and then going high key in black and white. This involves brightening the image immensely and cranking up the contrast. In this specific instance, I wanted a fairly harsh contrast, so I used the image->calculations method for black and white conversion. I then did my usual combination of layers with screen blend and Gaussian blur and so on ...

I also thinned out her face just a touch and reduced her shoulder significantly. She has a tendency to hunch over a little bit, so I needed to straighten her back. I like this result as well (duh ... do you think you'd be seeing it if I didn't?) ...


And finally, I decided to redo one specific part of this image ...


I like this image, but an earlier version in which I *destroyed* her eyes had much more sultry lips. These look like rich woman lips, while the original lips looked sultry, which was my goal. So I blended the two images for an alternate version.


I could spend a lot of time processing images from this shoot ... I have another thousand and some are quite good. But ... there is another shoot in about a week and I need to get ready for that one. I have decided to shoot the 70-300VR instead of my primes, based solely on my recent test of these lenses. The Nikon zoom did an amazing job ...

So all that is left is to decide if I have the cojones to bring some light stands, umbrellas and flashes.

Addition: I wanted to try one of the series of Julia with a boat in the background. I only have a few of these and I found one that looked ok ... but the pose cannot stand up to a simple treatment. It's just not compelling enough. And yes, this means I should just leave it alone, but I wanted to try something with it. So my B&W soft high key treatment rides again ...

And again it turned out more or less how I wanted. So I like it.


Addition 2: Saturday afternoon ... lovely day, went outside to jump in the pool and it started to rain! So I thought I'd redo an image a screwed up last night, when I destroyed Charlotte's hair. To my mind, Charlotte has a classic face for cover girl processing, so I went all out on her in this shot.