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.
