Shot of the Day from Tazz’s Trash the Dress Shoot

I’d probably been watching a bit too much CSI, or was it Criminal Minds – I think it was Criminal Minds – when I shot these . . . so no, they’re not very bridey shots. They do have a bit of a body in the grass thing going on. But I really love them! They also have a whole Ophelia reference going on. Check out this Wiki link to understand a bit more about the Ophelia painting – though the link doesn’t speak that much about the tradition of these paintings. If you do a quick image search on Google for ‘Ophelia painting’ you’ll pick up loads of images! I don’t think it’s important that images have connections to art history, but I do think it can make the shot richer to reference these things. By the same token I think it makes the shot richer if you reference popular culture or movies.

I like that these two image make me feel uncomfortable. I like the pull between this being a bride in a wedding dress shot and also a body in the grass shot.

The shots were essentially the same (I’ll put in my shot settings in a sec) and in DPP (the Canon Raw software) I pushed up the sharpness and also moved the white balance into a warm redish tone. In my final processing I went relatively light on the top image – as I recall all I added was a fairly heavy vignette and then a selective curves to pull up the centre of the image. It was the second image that I went a bit nuts with in terms of processing. I’m not sure if I’ve hit the nail on the head with this – I’ll only really know with the printing if so much red in the shot works – but we’ll soon see. You can see that I’ve shown all my adjustment layers and then shown what the shot looks like without the layers (image 4). Still a good shot without the adjustments, but I just felt that it was a little bit flat. We were losing light quite quickly. And I suppose, in retrospect, that I could’ve put an offboard flash onto Tazz to creat more contrast, but, for whatever reason, I didn’t. You’ll see that my adjustment layers are divided into two groups. The first group deals just with tone and contrast (the levels and curves layers that you can see). The second group is colour and you can see I’ve included an image where the colour group is turned off so that you can see what the image looks like just with the tone and contrast adjustments. The colour thing is new for me so it’s very experimental. At the bottom I’ve included the different colour adjustment layers that I used. There are definitely people out there who know a lot more about colour on Photoshop than I do. At present I don’t really have a particular reason for using one form of colour adjustment over another – I guess I’m just checking them out.

Here are my shot settings:

Shooting Mode    Manual Exposure
Tv( Shutter Speed )    1/200
Av( Aperture Value )    3.5
Metering Mode    Spot Metering
ISO Speed    160
Lens    EF24-70mm f/2.8L USM
Focal Length    25.0mm
Image Size    4368×2912
Image Quality    RAW
Flash    Off
White Balance Mode    Auto

P.S: You can see all the pics from this shoot here (they’re very low res – bandwidth in South Africa still sucks).

Tags: Photoshop tips, Shot of the Day