Studio Shoot and Photoshop

As part of my portfolio project to shoot portrait shots I set up the living room for high key photography.  This involved rigging a backdrop of white material that extended down over the floor.  I had four lights set up two at the back on the white screen set for F22 @ 1/125 sec and ISO 200.  The front two lights were set at F11 @ 1/125 sec and ISO 200.  I adjusted this down by closing up 2/3rdson the camera to F14.  I had An lie on the floor and therefore the over-exposed background was a bit of a wasted effort.  The original image is shown below:

Editing in Photoshop I selected the subject using the lasso and magic wand, I feathered the selection, inverted the selection, then selected the brush tool with a large setting.  I then brushed over with white across the image to clear the background.  I then re-sized the image to 8 x 12 inches @ 300dpi, applied a stroke and then re-sized the canvas by adding 6 and 4 inches to the long and short edges respectively.  The resulting image is shown below.

Messing around I then applied an effect, which was called Glowing Edges and sits in the Stylize option under the filters tab.  Which I thought looks ok, the image is below:

 



The most difficulty I had here is getting the subject to relax and be comfortable in front of the camera.  The inspiration for the pose came from a recent book I have bought called Photographing Models:1000 Poses A Practical Sourcebook For Aspiring And Professional Photographers by Eliot Siegel.  It is a useful book which gives good advice for lighting and other aspects of preparation as well as the different poses.  In a lot of cases the set up only requires one or two lights, which is quite handy.

I did take other shots during this shoot which I will post in due course.  For me this was about learning what sort of poses I liked, but remembering that it could be that it is better to ask what the model likes.  It was handy to show her the book and she could flick through and suggest poses.