Trying to make transition to daytime schedule and waiting to take my car in for oil change, so thought I might try to do a photo technique post based on what was talked about in the other thread. Using one of the Elle images because it's fresh in my mind having just done them. So, here we go:

Shoot -

Location is on the beach in Olympic National Park, Western Washington. Mid-afternoon, the sun is a little low in the sky. Completely overcast day on the coast. Even though it is overcast, light is relatively bright. Model is out on the beach, back towards water and the direction the sun is going down (West).

I've just swapped out my 28-135mm IS F/3.5-5.6 for a 70-200mm IS F/2.8L. I want to be able to swallow a little more light and the constant F/2.8 will give that to me. Also want to throw the background a out of focus.

Disadvantage of the overcast sky is that the colors won't pop and the image will look flat. Advantage is that I already know I'm going to be taking these to b&w and maybe toned so the somewhat muted colors won't matter. The flat part can be used to my advantage as it pulls the entire scene easily into the dynamic range of my camera and helps me to control my highlight detail and the shadows will be really nice and soft.

With the model's back to the light, I know I'm going to need to watch my shadows. The beach is reflecting some of the light back up, but if I meter the whole scene her face is going to be almost invisible. Manuever to put part of the rock spire between us and the bright overcast sky. That helps some. Quickly zoom in, meter off her face and then back out. Want to keep some shadow on her face to get a nice 3D feel, so I don't expose just for her face ... set an average exposure cheating more towards the expoure for her face. Adjust a little bit and fire off a couple shots.

Love the attitude in her stance and the intensity of her face so I zoom in ... tighter. While moving a little to my right. Puts rocks completely behind her, getting more texture in background while popping her face forward. She becomes brighter than the background. Concentrate on her eyes ... need them sharp. Gotta be sharp. Take one shot ... almost there. Then she moves her right arm, placing her hand behind the hip. Her right shoulder drops a little and she lowers her chin just a tad. Oh yea ... attitude. Very strong ... bingo .. love that comp. Pull the trigger.

Much of that is no longer concious. I know what I'm doing, but I'm not thinking through every step of it. It's not a mental checklist type of thing.

Next, postwork ...

Postwork for me starts at RAW image conversion. I use Phase One's Capture One DSLR Pro v3.6 to convert.

I already know that I want these to be in B&W, so I am using a version of C1 that I have applied a B&W color profile to. It lets me see the images as B&W from start to finish. But now I know I want this to be toned too and have a bit of a diffused look (I've worked the look out over a hundred or so earlier images).

1. I start by adjusting my black and white points. I then adjust my color temperature, tint, exposure and contrast to get the B&W image that looks best to me. In doing the contrast, I only give a slight increase. I want the image to be a little flat as I know that will work best when I add my toning and diffusion technique to it.

2. Image is converted and in Photoshop. I do some slight blemish removal with the healing brush. I like skin texture and blemishes work in some images, but I will remove them (freckles or moles or whatever) if I think they distract from the overall image.

3. With blemishes taken care of, image is ready for toning. I use a curve layer to tone the image. Gives me control over not only the tone color, but also extremely fine control of the tone across shadows, midtones and highlights if I need it.

4. With tone layer in place, I create a new layer above them all and "merge visible" to that layer. I then gaussian blurred that layer with a 20-30 pixel radius.

5. The blending mode of the layer is then changed to overlay and opacity adjusted to what I like. Doing this not only adds a soft diffusion look, but pulls up the contrast almost to where I want, giving deeper shadows and richer tone.

6. Finally, added a small contrast enhancing S-curve above it all. An S-curve is a curve where you lock down the center (so input 128 has an output of 128). You then pull a bit of the shadows low and the highlights high (so input 50 might become input 47 and input 202 might become 205). This stretches the difference between the highlighs and shadows a bit, while protecting the mids, giving you increase contrast. The name comes from the fact that the curve takes on an "S" shaped.

Done.

Don, excellent talk-through, made even better by the postworking! (",) (I've deleted my earlier comment to give your description more fluidity, and because in retrospect this isn't the time to discuss that :-D ) (",)

Nah, should have left it ... or moved it down. It was a relevant comment and something I wouldn't have minded answering here.

Extremely insightful and detailed post. Much appreciated. Thank you.

interesting to hear how you think about things....so different from me. i can tell you all about what i feel when i'm doing a particular shot...LOL thanks for sharing.

It's great to hear you technicalise what I still can discern as intuitive commonsense... your familiarity with photoshop functions has me in awe. Thank you for the details.