Simple agency tests I made with Karolina this Sunday

Hello everyone, this is my first blog post on SteemIt. I'm unsure if anyone will be interested in what I'm doing, but if I won't give it a try I will never know. Please be aware that I'm not an English native speaker - If you can, please help me correct grammar and vocabulary mistakes I make.

Last Sunday I have an opportunity to work with a interesting young model, Karolina for a WOManagement modeling agency. I had some mixed feelings when I was looking at her portfolio, but after a while I decided I will take the risk. I asked my close friend to help me with some simple clothes and we went down a place I scouted some time ago during a walk.

Whole photo session was shoot with Canon 5d mk IV and I spent around 3h with the model on location. Most of the shoots I made I took with 100mm Canon 2.8IS lens, but I did also few shoot with lovely 35mm Sigma Art lens which unfortunately I haven't selected later on for retouching.

It turns out that Karolina had pretty difficult face structure for me and It was pretty challenging to properly lid shadows that appear on her face. I had to look for an open space where light goes directly on her face, or try to light it up with reflector. During this shoot I also experimenting with an reflector as a 'eyecatch adder' rather than simple shadow filler, or main light. I pretty like this technique and I encourage for anyone involved in portrait photography to give it a try.

With a 100mm lens It is quite challenging to not have flat background and it was my main thing during the shoot that I was looking for. You might notice that I try to have walls in background form structure of a tunel on most of them. I was also trying to match colour of a clothes to a surrounding

I did also experiment at the very end with some shoots done trough a tree cloves. Actually I liked them enough to select it to later retouch.

As usual, all images I put onto my disk on my Macbook and open in Capture One for culing. This is a tough process where I goes trough all images (in this case around 344) where I selected the ones where emotion and pose matches my minimum standard. After that I select 6 out of those proper ones that 'stand's out of the crowd'. Recently I like apply small changes of exposure/shadow/highlight correction to all images before selecting, as It turns out that some images look more promising with them than without. Last step was to make them more or less unified across them, which Capture One is really good at and move to Photoshop.

In Photoshop I did what I usually do on portraits - trying to be natural and convincing, but make things more nice. It involves a little of Frequency Separation cleaning of the skin and some shape correcting where needed. At the end I add a little grain and sharpening to make image more crispy. Actually I spend like 10-15min in Photoshop for each photo.

Whole process this time took me like whole day (including shooting, culing and retouching). But usually it takes me longer, as sometimes it's hared to decide what images works and which one not.

That would be it for now on, please let me know if you are interested more in some parts of the workflow as I believe things that are kind of simple or obvious for me might be in fact quite interesting for others. Thank you for your time and hopefully see you soon.

Paweł Witkowski