Whenever you have a client who tells you that their little one is really into cowboys and horses, you do a little jump for a joy inside! When Anna and Joel arrived for Anna’s maternity session, we had to do a little set of Joel (the little one!) with his rocking-horse! These are two of my favorites.
I placed Joel just inside the shadow from the barn to the right in order to get as much as I possibly could from the sun while still keeping the background and subject as evenly lit as possible. With a shot like this, the trouble is making sure you have enough light on the face while still trying to minimize the highlights in the background — in this case, the columns winding their way behind him. I had to do some Photoshop and Lightroom work in order to make sure that I didn’t lose any detail in those columns. You may not be able to tell, but I had to do some Selective Leveling, for sure! The image straight out of my camera had those columns all hot and bothered!
Something else that I did was add a couple different tones into the Shadows. If you look at that column in the extreme right of the shot that’s engulfed in shadow, you can see what I mean: there are definitely blues added in there, and that was to cool down the shot. The grass was EXTREMELY green once I uploaded this into Photoshop, so I toned down the highlights in the greens as well as added in some cyan into the shadows of the greens, so that they wouldn’t pop quite so much.
All in all, I’m very pleased with this one! The other side of the barn was COMPLETELY shaded, so from a technical perspective, that would have been the most logical place to shoot. But I REALLY wanted those rustic columns that you see in this shot. So I sacrificed a little bit, knowing I was going to have to do a little more editing on it, and I’m really pleased with the result.
Let me know what you think in the comments!
Timmy's Blog 