A.D. Drumm Images, LLC – Landscape, Portrait, and Fine Art Photography in Rochester MN Photography

My previous two posts showed a couple specially processed photos from the session I shot with these folks. They refer to themselves as Framily.

I thought I’d show a few more normal shots of the group. They had a lot of fun ideas – as you can tell from the earlier shots. Most are theatre folks, so as the photographer, part of my job is just get out of the way and work with what they give me.

And usually, that’s plenty. You can see how camera shy and reserved they are.

It makes the shoot a lot of fun. For me, anyway! I think they were enjoying the shoot, too.

I did some post work to clean up the background and help them stand out.

But they came dressed for the occasion, with black that worked well against the white background, and some other bold colors.

Gesture, being an important part of a photo, was not much concern for me.

All in all, it went well, we all enjoyed the shoot, and I think we have some decent images out of it. Hopefully, Becca and her framily will think so, too!

Here’s another short post with another photo from the group shoot I did. Couldn’t let the guys off the hook. Looking at their pose, there just had to be something big happening behind them.

I don’t know – do these guys look like they belong with the gals from my last post? You decide.

During the holidays, I did several shoots. I’m slowly catching up with them. I’ve been doing more work on my I Dance personal project I’ve blogged about before. I’ll discuss that project in more detail eventually – perhaps after I display some of them at RCT’s run of The Producers – but the link to today’s topic is postproduction.

I enjoy working a photo in Photoshop perhaps as much as I love shooting. Back in the day, I was happy to spend time in the darkroom creating prints and exercising the various techniques I knew to achieve the results I wanted. But it was slow – incredibly slow by today’s standards. And there was the chemicals and the costs. The color paper I used, Cibachrome, was great but very pricey.

For most of my photographs, post means some adjustments, culling out the best shots, maybe hitting Photoshop or a plug-in for a few. For some, though, I look at the image and try to let it speak to me – what does it say, what’s it want me to do.

So it was with the image above. I did a shoot with Rebecca and several of her friends. The gals all got together to do this shot. Jay Maisel says with a shot like this, it’s not my photograph, it’s our photograph. That’s very true, and as I’ve said before, I love shooting actors. This Charlie’s Angels pose is pretty common, but actors give it that something extra.

Looking at it, it said I needed to extract the women and it said red. Okay, I have to admit it – a lot of images say red to me. I pulled them off the background and added the yellow-red gradient background, then did a couple finishing touches with Perfect Effects and Color Efex Pro. When I was done, it looked like a square crop would complete it.

I have a lot more work to do with the other shots from this shoot, but sometimes I have to start with the one that speaks to me the loudest.