Composting - Joel Grimes Style

I've been getting pretty booked up with senior portraits as summer winds down. I've been checking out some tutorials on how Joel Grimes does his work, so I decided to take a shot at it. My first problem was that I only had a softbox and umbrellas as light modifiers. So, I decided to build two strip lights out of left over rain gutters that I had. As the diffuser, I used tracing paper doubled up. Each strip light is about 3 ft long. Using the standard Joel Grimes 3 light setup (see below), I was able to get the following looks:

Marquette Lower Harbor Lighthouse

My family took a vacation this past week to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. A great place to visit, but I don't miss living there too much.

I don't normally do before/after photos. But here's a couple with a bit of an explanation. I plan on posting a video tutorial later on exactly how I did the editing for the non-HDR photo.

Front View of the Lighthouse

 



It was 2:00 pm so the sun was high (and hot), but there was really nothing I could do about this. The tours only run 3 times a day (11 am, 2 pm and 3pm). This is the only way you can see the front of the lighthouse with the walkway. To make this more challenging, I was holding my 3 yr old daughter in one hand to keep her from falling off the bridge (thank God for vertical grips!).

The adjustments: This was brought into Lightroom, Geotagged, labeled, and then I got to work. First I started with the shadows and highlights slider. After playing with the blacks and whites, the contrast was pretty set. The real trick here was the colors. To get the blues correct, I decreased the luminosity in the blue and aqua sliders. I then boosted the saturation a touch in both. I proceeded to do the same with the reds and greens, and then added a bit of warmth to the photo. Some basic sharpening was then done in Photoshop, along with some dodging and burning.

View from McCarty's Cove in HDR:

Before

After

This image was done with a 3 bracketed exposure (I included the neutral exposure as the before image). I used PhotoMatix to combine and tone map the images and then brought them into Photoshop for some dodging, burning, and color adjustments. It took me a while to get the lighthouse just right, it was really coming washed out, but I'm happy with the results. I really like how the rocks turned out in this one.