Photoshoot with Ellie
I have recently started working in collaboration with WINK Models Melbourne in order to assist their models in building their portfolios. Last week I had the absolute pleasure with working with the beautiful Ellie from WINK Models Melbourne click here to view the full album. Before undertaking the photo shoot, I was supplied with a moodboard from WINK. A moodboard is a very important tool to use when working with models as it acts as a base for the photographer to produce their images upon. I was provided with the moodboard below.
After contacting the model, we both decided to conduct the photoshoot on Greville Street in the beautiful suburb of Prahran. Greville Street is without a doubt one of the most beautiful streets that I have explored with its subliminal colour, vibrancy and amazing textures. For this shoot I used my trusty 5D Mark III with my 3 favourite lenses the 85mm f/1.8, 40mm f/2.8 and finally the 100mm f/2.8L. Fifteen minutes before the model arrived I briefly scouted the area looking for potential locations to take photos. After the model arrived I got straight into shooting. As we moved up and down Greville Street, the shoot was over within an hour with myself finishing the shoot with 255 images.
As soon as I arrived back home, I swiftly loaded all of my images into Lightroom and began selecting my favourite images from the shoot. I managed to narrow down 255 images into 18 favourite images. I edited these 18 images over the period of approximately a week. I usually would edit all of the images in one sitting but I discovered editing a few images every night allowed myself to put more time and effort into the individual intricacies of each image and to overall be more critical of myself.
Whilst in Lightroom I started playing with the Split Toning tool which I found to be a particularly useful component in my editing. The Split Toning tool allows you to change the colour and saturation of the highlights and shadows of the image. This is particularly useful in any sort of fashion or model-based photography as the photographer can add additional colours over the top of an image.
I additionally used the Mask Adjustment tool which allows you to apply certain image-based corrections to a particular section of the image. I used the Mask Adjustment tool to keep my subject exposed correctly and to slowly fade out the exposure towards the edges of the images to create a vignette effect. By applying this simple Mask Adjustment it made the photo below look much more dramatic and focused on the subject.
Finally, After I was finished editing my images I then began the retouching process in Adobe Photoshop, where I fixed minor inconsistencies in skin tone, makeup and reduced the harshness of unnecessary shadows. I used the frequency separation method in Photoshop which usually gives the best results out of all of the retouching methods. One downside to the frequency separation method is that it will take between 10 and 15 minutes to correctly retouch each independent image.
After retouching all of my photos I was relatively satisfied with the final images I produced along with my client, Ellie. I am definitely quite excited to continuing my work with WINK Models in the future.
