Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting
Posted on 22. Jun, 2008 by Terry Reinert in Photography
Technically the model in these photos is an 8 time world champion in Tae Kwon Do but I had to stick with the name of the hit song from Carl Douglas for the title to this post. I just don’t think that “Everybody Was Tae Kwon Do Fighting” would have the same effect. We all had a good time at the shoot and the results are fantastic. Aubrey did a great job and was a pleasure to work with. If the shots hadn’t turned out so good I might feel a little bad about having her go out and stand on the rocks… the water was a little cold and a whole lot deeper than we thought! Since she is not quite 18 yet her mom accompanied her to the shoot and ended up playing assistant for me. I didn’t take my boom stand to hold the reflector since it would have been a 42″ wind sail so her assistance was a big help.
The setup I used was my typical 2 Canon Speedlight setup with a 42″ gold reflector thrown into the mix. Since the theme of the shoot was martial arts I wanted that strong and powerful look instead of the soft and sweet look. So I kept my off camera flash pointed right at her about 6 feet away and shot most of frames from a low angle. I upped the power for the on camera flash and had it pointed at the gold reflector which was near the ground and angled so as to bounce the gold tinted light back up onto her. I used a circular polarizer on my Canon 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 lens and shot at ISO100, f/8.0, 1/80 with my Canon 5D.
To give you a little idea of the post processing that I did I grabbed a screen shot of the layers palette for the side kick shot above.
The “BG Multiply Layer” is a copy of the BG with the layer mode set to multiply and the opacity dropped to 40%. This darkened the image slightly and added more saturation to the sky and water. I dropped the opacity to keep the saturation of her skin down. The “Darkened Border” layer is another copy of the background layer set to Multiply but this time I used the rectagle selector tool to select a large rectangle about 1 inch from each border. Then I feathered the selection by 250 pixels and hit the delete key. This knocked out the entire center of the layer leaving a nice darkened border around the image that draws the eye inwards to the subject. I got that trick from Scott Kelby at Photoshop World. The “Skin Softening” layer is a copy of the background layer with a 20 point Guassian Blur filter added to it. Then I masked the whole thing out and only brought back the areas of her skin. I dropped the opactiy to 35% and now her skin has a nice soft beauty glow look to it. Thats it!
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Ilah
22. Jun, 2008
Those are really sharp and powerful images and they really let you know she’s someone not to be trifled with. I like the darkened border layer, It really draws the eye into the center and it’s similar to the technique that Moose Peterson uses-he darkens the corners using the filter->distort pretty much putting slight vignette on them (as opposed to removing the darkening that most people use it for). I like knowing more than one way to work the same idea, thanks for posting the walk-through
Terry
22. Jun, 2008
If he wants heavier vignetting he should shoot with a Canon 5D with a slow lens opened up wide! I read in a review from 2005 that there was some heavy vignetting in those conditions with many of the cheaper lens. I can say that this is true. So, I need to buy some of those super fancy (and expensive) Canon lens with the better optics.
I like the layer trick that Kelby teaches because it darkens all the borders instead of just the corners. But I agree that it really draws the attention into the photo. When I saw this during one of Kelby’s classes it blew me away.