Editorial Shoot – Sharna – Illawarra Fashion Photographer

Shot with Olivia Clee and Ulladulla model, Sharna on the weekend for an editorial shoot. We searched the streets of the Wollongong CBD and found all sorts of cool textures – red bricks, rusted window grates and the slats outside the Ibis Hotel Wollongong.

We shot for aroun 2.5 hours, it rained on and off, but Sharna was a trooper so she didn’t let a little flyaway frizz worry her (true spirits of a real model).

Basically what I did here is set up my ring flash to camera left, at 45 degrees. Had the aperture on f/1.8 which I could get away with because the Orbis ring flash can lose up to 3 whole stops of light when diffusing a 580 EX2 Canon speedlight. So anyway, the original wasn’t anything special. Although Sharna was nothing short of beautiful, the contrast was very low and it needed a little TLC. Here it is, straight out of the camera:

As you can see, the exposure is pretty spot on, could give it a little contrast boost but no biggy. Eye is nice and sharp and I’m smiling at this point.

So we get out photoshop and start off and work some magic starting by healing the odd spots. Healing all the cracks under her eyes, the red in her cornea (right in the corner there), removing the stray eyelashes and lightening up the dark patches under the eye.

The eyes are always the fun part! As you can see the second shot the eyes have been touched up to extremes, drew in some extra highlights, accentuated the catchlights and darkened the edges of the rim to make the eyes more bold.

Secondly, I thought I would restucture a few things and make the face a little more symmetrical. I bloated one eye (the one on our left) to make the focal point dead-set obvious, very subtle change but still very significant. I plumped up the lips and restructured the nose  a little bit (like I said, Sharna’s gorgeous the way she is, but in photoshop you will always find things you can always improve).

Then came the fun part – facial contouring using curves, different opacities of the burn and dodge tool as well as the patch tool. Used a series of soft light filters, gaussian blur once or twice and ta-da! The trick is to see where the light is coming from (direction) and follow the natural contours of the face ie highlights on chin, nose peak and just underneath the eyebrows.

After that, there was a tad sharpening of the eye, a glamour LR3 plugin for the skin and then finally a Dragan Preset in Lightroom 3 to finish it off.

Here’s a side by side view

Thanks for stopping by! See you at the next post!

Your fashion photographer, Ela!