photo editing | RJMeyerArts

Foreground image was taken in the studio with accent lights on both sides of the face and one light to camera right. Background looked too dull and I wanted to “jazz it up” . Many hours of blood sweat and tears take place on and off the court so decided to try blending the subject with a background photo of the gym. Still too blah…

I tried a haze in the background, but not enough texture for me. What to do, what to do? Found some free smoke brushes and played around? Here is the link to the free brushes found at a site called ucreative.com. (Click on link) Made a transparency layer to apply the smoke to the background, erasing if necessary and another transparency layer on top of the image. Go Lancers!

While available light is easy to use, I don’t like how it blows out the sky when doing backlit portraits. This portrait setup involved strong sunlight as it lowered in the sky, football field light, and two Canon 580 EX II speedlights with Cyber-sync radio triggers. Speedlights were on both sides of the subject to outline and define his strong features at manual 1/4 and about 10 feet away from subject. Camera angle low to give the portrait a feeling of strength and size while keeping the field light in view. Canon 5D Mark 3 settings were ISO100 at 8.0 and 1/125. Post processing involved basic adjustments in Lightroom and HDR in Photoshop with a few other tweaks.

We were so fortunate to have such a beautiful evening with no wind and pleasant temps. Go Bulldogs!! Yeah, life is good…