I had the wonderful pleasure of working with the talented Diana Ortiz. If you don’t know who this person is….well you should! You can follow her and her husband, Manny Ortiz, on Instagram or YouTube. He offers very informative tech knowledge, behind the scenes photoshoots, and lots more. Check them out here
So back tracking a little bit. I’ve been out of the game for about 8 months due to medical malpractice. You can read all about it in my previous post if you’re curious. Ok moving on! So after being absent I was itching to create so naturally I went with gels because I live for color!! Below you can see the setup I had.
As you can tell from the images the panels are very close to her but far enough that she could put her hands to her face and have her elbows out. To create that shine we used baby oil and some makeup to create the shimmer and lastly some water to get the dewy look.
For the lighting setup I used the Dracast 500 S Series LED panels. I do not own flash heads that have modeling lights and I really wanted to see the lights in real time so I used these bad boys. My settings along with the camera and lens were:
Canon 5DS R
Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM Lens
100mm · f/2.8 · 1/250s · ISO 1600
The images do have a high ISO and I usually keep my shutter speed at 1/160 but because I was very shaky and the lights with gels were already dim I have to compensate for that in other areas.
I’m extremely happy with the results to say the least! I did bump up the vibrance in Photoshop to make it a bit more rich for the first two images and for the last one I did alter the colors to something a little more subtle. Other than the basic editing such as skin smoothing, fly aways, dodge and burn (not that she needs it, this woman’s face is flawless) not much was done to it.
The third image was a little bit more involved and that’s because I wanted to make it slightly more tame compared to the first two. Some people might ask “well why didn't you just do it during the shoot and not do it in post?” “that’s cheating, that’s not real photography!” so on and so forth. Everyone is entitled to their opinions. The reason why I decided to do it differently is to 1) make a collection of three to frame them in the studio and 2) I’m always looking for ways to push my retouching skills. Check down below for a before and after
The GIF quality isn’t the best but you get the idea.
So whether you do beauty portraits and rely minimally on retouching or go all out and create composites, you do YOU, just don’t be a dick ;) some of y’all know what I’m talking about.