What's there not to love about taking beauty shots? You spend the day with a talented team of individuals and take photos of beautiful models. In this two part post we'll be delving into the key elements of a beauty shoot, their costs, how to schedule your day, common lighting configurations and briefly discuss retouching. If you're looking to add beauty photograp[...]
Tags archives: portrait
Mastering Dodging and Burning: 4 Techniques for Beautiful Photos
In this in-depth video I'll be taking a somewhat different approach to demonstrating dodging and burning. Rather than cover the actual painting aspect of dodging and burning, I'll be focusing on 4 different approaches and discussing which is best suited for various situations, the best practices for each and the limitations that come with them. The video is beginner t[...]
Creating Beautiful Hair Highlights in Photoshop
In this video tutorial I'll be covering some techniques for making hair highlights in your portraits look beautiful. Rather than just enhancing the highlights, we'll also be discussing how to deal with common issues that arise when shooting dark haired models. Some of the tools that will be discussed include:
Layer blend modes
Channels based selection and adjust[...]
10 Best Photos of 2012
Although a bit overdue, I thought I'd share my 10 favourite images that I shot in 2012 and explain what I like about them. At the least I can use it as a yardstick for 2013 and aim to improve. The images are in no particular order as ranking them from 1 through 10 would be too daunting a task as my preference for one over another seems to change on a daily basis. Part[...]
Kelby Training Review
Having explored a great number of videos on Kelby Training for over three months now, I think it's time that I post a brief review of the site and make suggestions to those that are considering joining. On the plus side, Kelby Training offers a month to month subscription which lowers your level of commitment and allows you to try it out at a relatively low cost of $2[...]
Portrait Do's and Don'ts
Perhaps it's just me, but I often stumble onto local studio photographer websites and am saddened by what I see in their portrait portfolio's. I'm not referring to more arty or fashion oriented portraits as this is a different and much more subjective realm. I'm talking about a standard head shot that is meant to depict the person as they really are. The sort used by [...]
Shooting Beverly Hills Style
I've had several people ask about the lighting setup and details behind the Beverly Hills Style shoot that I've posted to 500px and Facebook recently. Rather than answer each one I promised that I would provide some details here on how the photos were taken.
The majority of people believe the photos are taken with natural light, which is partially true. While the r[...]