SCN Falls Farm Shoot (1)
As mentioned in an earlier post (here) I recently got the privilege of doing a photographic shoot with SCN at Falls Farm in Lesmurdie.
SCN and I actually planned this shoot about eight or nine weeks ago but due to various problems that popped up each weekend we had to keep putting it further and further back. There was either a function going on at the Falls Farm cottage, or the the weather was not suitable (mainly being that there was too much wind happening), or one or the other of us had something else going on.
Finally on the weekend before last we managed to sync up. It was an overcast Sunday afternoon but at least the wind was not too gusty and I could fill-in for the lack of sun with a bit of diffused flash.
These days I am taking everything as RAW (using Adobe’s digital negative DNG format). I take nothing as JPG. Hence I now have to ‘develop’ all pictures to JPG on my computer but there is no doubt whatsoever that this does produce much better outcomes than the in-camera JPG processing.
I have done very little post processing on this shot. All I have basically done is crop it, resize it down to a suitable size to post (using Bi-Cubic resizing), and then applied ten percent of general sharpening or fog-sharpening as some people refer to it (10 percent sharpening with 20 pixel radius and Threshold=0).
I am taking the picture from a low shooting point—standing on the ground off the end of the veranda. This will make more sense if you go to the earlier post about Falls Farm (linked above). You will be able to work out where SCN is positioned and I was to the right off the end of the veranda on the ground.
There is -1.5 stops of fill-in flash from an on-camera flash and as a result there is a bit of flash-back coming from SCN’s shiny shoes. That’s the problem with using flash. If there is anything glassy or glossy around you risk getting flash-back. It doesn’t help that I am shooting from a low vantage. If I had been shooting from the veranda level up with SCN I probably would not have got this flash-back due to the sharper angle from the flash to the shoes. Such is the life of a photographer.
Even so, I do like the effect of shooting from the lower vantage—probably about level with SCN’s knees. And this is not a mistake! I actually planned to shoot from the lower vantage. Honest, I did. When I first reconnoitred the Falls Farm location for an SCN shoot I planned then to take pictures from the lower shooting angle.
Some people might say that the picture is too soft and that I should have done some edge sharpening—which would be the normal thing to do. However I left it at this point because I liked the softness of the result. Also my 18-135 lens is out at 117mm for this shot so the extended focal length and the distance to the model will also be introducing a bit of softness.
But I like it.
If you would like to see a larger higher resolution version of this shot then clicking on the picture will link you to the version stored in SmugMug—for which you will need the secret Abalook password [don’t forget to use Ctrl+Click to open SmugMug in a new Tab].
