MarkBarbieri
Semi-retired
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2006
- Messages
- 6,172
A co-worker had a baby a few weeks ago. I stopped by her house on Saturday for a baby photo shoot. Here's one of the shots from the shoot:
The baby is laying on a rolled up blanket on a table. The picture was taken with a 5D Mark III using a 100mm macro lens. I shot in manual exposure with an aperture of f/5.6, shutter speed of 1/125, and ISO of 400. I started with the aperture because it gave me the amount of DOF I wanted for the baby. I picked the shutter speed to be fast enough to keep things sharp at 100mm. I adjusted the ISO give me about 1 stop of underexposure.
I used two flashes to add light. The main light is a flash in manual mode going through a 24"x24" Ezybox (a portable softbox). The wall is also lit with a flash in manual mode.
Here is the shot after some basic lightroom adjustments (mostly adding a little negative clarity and cloning out some baby acne.
I would have liked to have shot the baby wider like the first picture, but I didn't have room. Instead, I created the additional space using the content-aware scaling tool in Photoshop. It was far from perfect. The scaled area had three majors problems I needed to fix. First, the lines on the left side of the table didn't work, so I cloned them out. Second, the scaling gave everything a textured look. I used the Gaussian Blur tool to fix that. Finally, the wall lighting was uneven because the scaled areas were darker than the center. I fixed that with some dodging and burning.
There is still a major problem with the picture. You can't see if in this small scale copy, but the background has some ugly "posterization" look to it where you see alternating bands of color. I think it is because of the combination of the gaussian blur and the content aware scaling pattern. I'll redo it later by adding monochome noise before I do the blur. The noise will mask the pattern so everything should look a lot smoother. Of course, you won't see the noise after the guassian blur smooths it away.
I'd also like to reduce the blur on the edge of the table between it and the wall. I don't want it razer sharp, but it is too soft.
What would I have done differently? That's always a good question to ask after you've worked on a shot for a while. I probably would have not used the flash on the wall. Because it hit the wall at a fairly steep angle, it added texture to the wall that I didn't want. It wasn't that big a deal because I had to blur to get rid of the scaling texture anyway, but I'd rather have avoided it. If the wall was still too dark, I would have either used two lights, one on either side so that they filled in each other's shadows, or one light at a much shallower angle. I would also have fought for every last bit of space around the baby. The scaling would have worked better if I had given it more picture to work with. The slices between the edge of the frame and the baby were so small that the scaling was pretty ugly.
The baby is laying on a rolled up blanket on a table. The picture was taken with a 5D Mark III using a 100mm macro lens. I shot in manual exposure with an aperture of f/5.6, shutter speed of 1/125, and ISO of 400. I started with the aperture because it gave me the amount of DOF I wanted for the baby. I picked the shutter speed to be fast enough to keep things sharp at 100mm. I adjusted the ISO give me about 1 stop of underexposure.
I used two flashes to add light. The main light is a flash in manual mode going through a 24"x24" Ezybox (a portable softbox). The wall is also lit with a flash in manual mode.
Here is the shot after some basic lightroom adjustments (mostly adding a little negative clarity and cloning out some baby acne.
I would have liked to have shot the baby wider like the first picture, but I didn't have room. Instead, I created the additional space using the content-aware scaling tool in Photoshop. It was far from perfect. The scaled area had three majors problems I needed to fix. First, the lines on the left side of the table didn't work, so I cloned them out. Second, the scaling gave everything a textured look. I used the Gaussian Blur tool to fix that. Finally, the wall lighting was uneven because the scaled areas were darker than the center. I fixed that with some dodging and burning.
There is still a major problem with the picture. You can't see if in this small scale copy, but the background has some ugly "posterization" look to it where you see alternating bands of color. I think it is because of the combination of the gaussian blur and the content aware scaling pattern. I'll redo it later by adding monochome noise before I do the blur. The noise will mask the pattern so everything should look a lot smoother. Of course, you won't see the noise after the guassian blur smooths it away.
I'd also like to reduce the blur on the edge of the table between it and the wall. I don't want it razer sharp, but it is too soft.
What would I have done differently? That's always a good question to ask after you've worked on a shot for a while. I probably would have not used the flash on the wall. Because it hit the wall at a fairly steep angle, it added texture to the wall that I didn't want. It wasn't that big a deal because I had to blur to get rid of the scaling texture anyway, but I'd rather have avoided it. If the wall was still too dark, I would have either used two lights, one on either side so that they filled in each other's shadows, or one light at a much shallower angle. I would also have fought for every last bit of space around the baby. The scaling would have worked better if I had given it more picture to work with. The slices between the edge of the frame and the baby were so small that the scaling was pretty ugly.
The lighting on the baby is perfect. Was your flash set to TTL or manual.
