steamkittens

BREAKDOWN 005 - Greenery (Patreon)

Published:

2019-02-08 01:03:14

Imported:

2024-02

Tags:

SuddenlyGreen breakdown flower soup tethered

Content

I posted a Before|After comparison of this final shot to the original out of camera, but thought I'd take a longer look at the progress and decision making between the in camera shot and final posted image.

As with most bathrooms shoots there is a distinct lack of space and while I've shot in a bathroom half this size we were definitely pushed for space. The was a large ledge at the head of the bath perfect for standing on to take top down shots but as most of you know I have a severe mobility disorder and there is no way I could, one get up on the ledge and two not fall instantly down again. So as with the x23 shoot from a few days earlier we set up the M3 Jinbei Medium Aluminium Light Stand and Boom with the Camera attached positioned directly over the bath about 2 metres up. The camera was attached to a Microsoft Surface Pro v2 via a Tether Tools cable allowing me to shoot remotely using Adobe Lightroom Classic CC.

Pros and Cons of shooting tethered to Lightroom

I really like the overhead straight down aesthetic in portrait photography and tethered shooting is perfect for this as it means you can avoid the rigmarole of setting up rigging or scaffolding to get yourself into position without all the actual rigging or scaffolding getting in the way of the shot. Another pro of shooting tethered especially with my mobility issues is once it's setup I can sit (relatively) comfortably and take shots which load onto the tablet screen and you can zoom in and see detail etc.

As a tether capture option Lightroom is a bit archaic compared to other modern solutions. It doesn't have a live view so you cant see the shot through the camera until you take it. You cant adjust camera setting remotely, so you need to access the camera to change Shutter Speed, Aperture and ISO as well as flash trigger settings. There are other software solutions that gives you access to the setting and live mode, as well as hardware solutions like CamRanger and Arsenal, the later of which I have ordered and can't wait to play with.

A couple of the main issues I faced with what I wanted to achieve was firstly the bath was very small. I had trouble getting Justine low enough in the bath to get her head in the right spot without having trouble finding room for the legs . Secondly I needed about double the green foliage we had to pad out the edges so I didn't get as much fill to cover the bath as I would have liked.

This meant that I had to crop in much more that I wanted to to achieve a composition that would work

The first thing I did was auto fill the bath edges to fill in the areas I didn't want showing. While autofill can do an ok job its easy to see the repetition but it does a good enough job to give us a base to build on.

Next I added a layer of smoke elements because it started to obscure the autofill areas I wanted to hide and added to the mood I was trying to achieve.

I go into my stock collection and find an string of leaves on a transparent background and blur them.

Again this is to hide certain areas as well as add a sense of depth to the scene making it look less like it was taken in a bath and more like it was in a lake somewhere. I even add one across the stomach to push this area into the background a little more.

Next I went in and added some sharpening and contrast to the skin mainly around the face.

Finally I went in and did come colour correction work.

Gear

As discussed in the intro I had the camera up on a boom stand over the bath. Originally I thought I would need to use a wider angle lens but luckily I was able to use my preferred 50mm. For lighting I just had the flash sitting on the window ledge angles up to the roof away from the model. I did try different spots but again because I couldn't adjust flash or camera settings without pulling the camera down I could only put the flash at a similar distance or I would over or under expose the image.