Thursday, July 9, 2009

Before & After, Episode 4 | WESLEY CHAPEL FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHER

In this episode we'll take a look at an image that I captured a couple of months ago while hanging out with some dear friends of mine....well, actually it's two images combined into one, but I processed both of them the exact same way. The kids are Carter and Katie, who are just flat-out adorable, and so photogenic that it made my job an absolute breeze.

Anyway, I had the kids stand in front of their respective parents and then asked mom and dad to put their hands on the kids' shoulders. I was trying to grab a couple of shots that would draw attention to each child's size, relative to the parent standing behind them. These are the sorts of pictures that you look back on many years later and your heart just wells up thinking about how tiny your kids were. As with all of my clients, I wanted to give Rob an Rachel a family heirloom to cherish for years and years, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity.

When I was retouching the images in Photoshop, I decided to take a risk and try a technique that I had never really played around with-- it's called cross processing. Back in the darkroom days when you developed film by hand, this process involved dipping your undeveloped negatives into a chemical solution that was designed for a completely different type of film. Whether done by accident or intentionally, it produced a photograph with wildly unpredictable color tones, and oddly enough this look eventually became a mainstay in the fashion industry.

Well, in the digital days this same look can be emulated with much greater ease, thanks to programs like Photoshop. It's also possible to exercise a much greater degree of control over the final product, because in the digital world the tools work exactly the same each time-- it's just a matter of a few mouse clicks.

The only thing I really did to these images, besides cross processing them, was to re-crop them to improve their overall composition. Tell me what you think by leaving me a comment below (just choose "Anonymous" if you don't have a Blogger or Gmail account).








1 comments:

D said...

Hey Russ I love the blog and the pics. I went back and read all your "Before and After" series and in the first series you asked for people to provide feedback. Well I really enjoy the before and after ESPECIALLY when you provide information pertaining to what you did to get the resulting image! However I am not happy with the fact that I had other plans but am to caught up in all this to do them! :) Thanks for the tips!! Great stuff.

Derek

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I'm a commercial photographer in Tampa, FL specializing in band & musician promos, CD covers, press kits, posters, and the like. Please feel free to check out my website/blog using the link below, and give me a shout if I can be of service to you!

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