Photoshoot in Val d'Isère
Whilst on holiday in the beautiful location of Val d'Isère I decided to pull out the 5D Mark III to do a quick model shoot session click here to view the full album. Constricted to 3 models, 45 minutes and suboptimal lighting conditions I knew I certainly had a challenging task ahead of me. Before beginning the shoot, I allowed myself 10 minutes to adequately plan the shoot. It is crucial as a photographer to know your shooting location quite well before the shoot. Before the shoot you should always explore the area thinking about the types and styles of photos you intend on taking. After the models had finished applying their makeup it was shooting time!
For this shoot I mostly used my favourite combination of portrait lenses: the 85mm f/1.8 and 100mm f/2.8. I also set my 5D Mark III to solely use the single-point AF mode allowing me to perfectly set the lenses focus on the eyes, the most critical part of shooting a great portrait image. I started the shoot beside a window using a silver light reflector to help balance the lighting on the models face. A reflector is one of the best investments a photographer can make, costing around $20 on eBay it will significantly improve your photos. See the before and after examples for yourself!
After being satisfied with the images I took by the window, I decided to move outside into the beautiful snowy atmosphere of Val d'Isère. I found a nice looking snow-covered tree and decided to use this as my background. After capturing a few shots, I noticed that the model was underexposed as a result of the overexposed snowy white background. When doing any professional photographic work, it is important to shoot your photos in the RAW image format. This prevents the camera from removing any important information in the images which is very important for the post-production phase.
After finishing the shoot, I quickly loaded all the shots onto my computer beginning editing in Adobe’s Lightroom, the industry standard for photo editing. It is at this phase that the beauty of RAW images truly shines. The RAW images allowed me to bring the highlights right down and to increase the exposure in the darker regions of the image without hindering the quality of the image, a problem that JPEG images experience. After colour correcting all of my favourite shots from the shoot I also decided to work on some black & white shots. Making a photo black & white really allows you to accentuate the details of your models especially in combination with the clarity, contrast and the black & white mix tools. Adjusting an images clarity on Lightroom allows you to further bring out textures in an image, whether it be clothing, freckles or any other high contrast regions. The black & white mix tool was also extremely useful allowing me to individually control the black & white exposure of any individual colour allowing me to produce the perfect black & white images, see before and after below.
Finally, after finishing retouching all the photos I was very satisfied with how they looked. Like always, there is always room for improvement and for any similar future shoots I would like to take the photos from further away. This allows for more room to crop during post-production. Some of my images were taken too closely to the model making any crop and image levelling work quite difficult. Despite this minor imperfection I was still very happy with the end result of the photos and look forward to doing more shoots like this in the future.
