I am in NYC shooting a catalogue/ad campaign for a long time client of mine. While shooting these shots, I realized that they are kind of old school.
This client doesn’t like to spend a lot of money or time on the retouching of shots. It’s just easier to get it right while we shoot.
The art director spends a lot of time watching the monitor and getting everything just right. He also pushes me to light the shots right the first time, and not worrying about post production. It reminds me of the old film days, when you had to get it right.
The next time you say “I’ll just fix it in post”, remember if you do it right the first time you might not have to .
Kevin Focht
For more tips and tricks and cool retouching tools check out FochtCreative.com
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4 Comments at "It’s Not About Post It’s All About Light"
Great post, Kevin. I couldn’t agree with you more.
Wonderful shots by the way.
John
IMHO, I think you should have rounded out the model’s figure some with some angled light instead of this head-on look. With someone this twiggy, the pose and the light add to the skeletal look, and the dress looks like a paper cut-out put over the model- ie. there’s no depth to it.
You’ve got lots of great texture, and the positive/negative space is glaringly obvious, but the sense of sculpted form is totally lost. If that’s what your director was going for, fine and dandy, but it’s my initial gut reaction that I don’t find much about it to be attractive. That’s just one man’s opinion, so take it with a grain of salt.
Amen to this sentiment! I’m sometimes made to feel like I’m not a proper photographer because I don’t do any post-processing. Instead I focus on getting it right in the camera, so I don’t need to do anything digitally.
Dan,
There is always a give and take with a client. We had two models that day and had 25 shots to do. I would love to shoot each model lit to their own body style, but you see it is about the clothes and not the girl. The main thing is to get tons of texture in the beading in the dresses.
Everyone has their style and mine has never been “rounded”lighting. I have always thought it is ugly. I am all about the light on the face. Most photographers tend to cross light and have heavy shadows on the face. I am not most photographers.
I am glad you disagree with it because that is what makes photography great. If you know your style, great!
It took me years to figure out mine. At the end of the day if the client is happy, then I have done my job. If I wanted to shoot it exactly like I wanted to, then I can do that on my own time. I have had this client for over 10 years and they pay me very well, so I must be doing something right.
If you could see the size of the room this was shot it, you would laugh. We actually had to take down storage shelves to shoot here.
You should also know that these are two shots from about 2000 that I did a quick grab of. They are straight out of the camera with no exposure or color balance adjustments.
Look for them in Brides in about 3-4 months in full page ads!
Kevin
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