My name is Kevin Focht and I have been a fashion/beauty photographer for over 20 years shooting for clients ranging from Nordstrom to Elegant Bride. I am an owner of a luxury studio in Portland Oregon. Left Turn Studio specializes in high end weddings, high school seniors, family portraits and kids too. With my studio partner, Andrew (Fundy) Funderburg, we are constantly looking for ways to separate us from other studios.

In my  posts on the DWF Blog I will be sharing insights and tips about what is hot photographically, as well as photoshop and lighting tips. Let’s get to Lens Flare

Using Lens Flare

One of my favorite things to do, is to use lens flare to make a mundane shot look cooler. I look for situations that I can spill light across the subject and hit the front element of my lens. In this shot of Adam and Amanda (taken on the Amalfi Coast in Italy), the location was amazing and probably would have worked just fine by itself, as you can see in the first shot.

By using lens flare, I was able to make a nice shot spectacular, but I thought it still needed more.

I then took the image into photoshop and hit it with an action to pop the colors, and added a texture overlay. In this case I used one of my Amalfi coast textures as you can see in shot two.

Lens flare tends to flatten out the image so you need to add contrast back into your shots in post processing.

I like this shot, but now I think the texture on her arms and face are a little too much. I used the lasso tool to select the area around the couple and set the feather to 10. Once selected I use the gaussian blur at 15 pixels on the texture layer to clear up the skin in the final image.

As you can see, it is a completely different shot from where I started. The first being a nice shot, but the final being a work of art!

I also thinned down her arm with the Liquify filter for a final touch. I will go onto this in depth in future posts.

Always take a look at your killer shots and ask yourself if there is any way you can improve it, to give it that little extra pop. That’s what separates us from the uncle Bobs!

For more information on our actions and texture overlays check out our site http://www.leftturncreative.com