Shoot: Sharp Washed Photo Effect with Camera RAW only

A short while ago I did a photo shoot with rapper/musician Andrew Vazquez of Alpha Boy Productions right out of Philadelphia-an up and coming production company-and today I have this photo I shot late afternoon underneath an overpass. All things considered it was a fast-paced photo shoot as we had the setting sun and intense traffic through the city on a Friday evening to deal with. Below I will run over some of what I did as well as a couple other shots from the shoot.

Equipment:

This shot-as mentioned-was shot late in the afternoon on a gorgeous day (we actually caught a big break in the weather). For the better part of the day I was using my Sigma 17-70mm F2.8-4.5(which incidentally is a great lens for the price. Great focusing, sharpness, and Bokeh is really great, and it can be used for macro photography very easily) and a few off camera Canon 580EX II Speedlite Flashes. For those of you that don’t know I do the bulk of my shooting with my lowly (yet dearly loved and somewhat small) Canon Rebel XT which actually works great, my only two gripes are the relatively low mega pixel count (8) and 800 ISO is pretty much all you can get away with before Noise Ninja becomes necessary, anyway since it was released a number of years ago I have been using it. Go ahead blow me away with what kind of camera you use…make me jealous

Shot Settings:

For this shot I did not use a tripod as I was moving pretty fast and trying to get multiple shots done before nightfall (this included a cross city trek… on foot) and I actually did not even use the one light stand I had on my back I just placed the flash on the camera with a diffuser and dialed the power down about -2 stops. I shot this photo at 1/200 sec and F6.3 with an ISO of 400 again with the Speedlite (Canon 580 EX II) mounted directly on the hot shoe as mentioned before.

Getting Out:

Getting out of Philly was almost as tough as the afternoon of shooting(albeit my ankles prefer sitting in the car over walking for a few hours) and it was definitely helpful to have all of my equipment bagged and organized so after the last location we could get the heck outta there.

WorkFlow:

Typically the first thing I will do when I get back from a shoot is plug my card into my computer and fire up the Bridge and go File>Get Photos from Camera and just choose the card and bring all of the images over, convert them to DNG, and back them up to an external drive all in one fell swoop. While that is churning I unload the car and put everything away and charge up batteries and clean my camera gear and lenses. Typically by the time I do that (and grab a bite etc… etc…) the images are typically transferred. After that its camera RAW time and I make my first round of editing. This is where we move into a mini-tutorial of sorts on how I got the muted/high contrasty look of that first photo.

Camera RAW:

I shoot everything in Camera RAW and the more I use it (and Adobe updates it) the more I love it. I used Lightroom once and did not really like it, but so many photographer friends tell me about how great it is so I may give it a shot (hey Adobe how about including it in the Suite?!). For now The Camera RAW does the trick. Basically for this image I adjust the exposure and fill light, maybe pump a little black into the image and boost the brightness and contrast a little each. After that I pushed the Clarity way up and cut the Vibrance by about 35%. I then added a bit of sharpening and a post-crop vignette. Used the adjustment brush on the eyes and the watch and the image you see was before I took it into Photoshop and did any extra sharpening, cloning, smoothing etc… etc…

Final Image (After Camera RAW):

A big thanks to Andrew Vazquez for being such a great dude to hang with that afternoon and shoot and of course for allowing me to use the images of him on the site! Best of wishes man!