Welcome to Imigence!
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Balloons
My brother got married in late April and a few weeks before this they asked me to do a pre-wedding shoot with them as is common practice these days with most couples wanting to get married. It’s something that alleviates the stress of having to do an actual shoot during or after the wedding itself when there are already too many things happening to begin with.
This was taken as a HDR photo and I’m quite glad that I think it doesn’t look too obvious that it is a HDR. The sun was pelting down hard on that day and so it was always going to cast very strong shadows in the shades and over-expose everything else. We had planned a long day of shooting so rather than opt to carry bulky reflectors, I thought this was going to be a good way around the exposure problem.
Of course, when you apply one solution, a different set of problems arise. It made for an easy shooting method, but post-processing definitely was no picnic. Balloons don’t like to remain still when faced with a breezy day at Williamstown and HDR doesn’t particularly work easily when you have too much difference from frame to frame. In the end I’ve had to resort to manually bringing up each layer rather than using an automated program.
All up, the entire day was about 8 hours worth of shooting, 4 wardrobe changes, many kilometres of driving (and walking around the city) and lots of balloons released into the the sky. By the end of it we were well and truly knackered but we got what we wanted!
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Glittering Crux
I’m a person that’s all about salvaging something out of any situation, no matter how wrong it might have turned out. There are always moments when you’ll need to give up but it’s a satisfying experience when you actually create something that in technical terms was a failure to begin with.
The photo below is from a Star Driver shoot (my fourth one, if memory serves me correctly) a few months ago. I had three flashes set up; key light is on the front right corner, fill light on the front left and one flash in the back right pointing parallel to them for rim lighting and illuminate the fog. As (bad) luck would have it of course, the key light kept misfiring all day (and I was down to my last set of batteries). Click here for the original result.
To be honest, though the original photo was technically a mistake, I actually liked it as it was anyway. So I had a choice, upload it as it was or try to see what I can achieve with image editing. After I realised that I can bring out more detail from the shadows and end up with this more dramatic rather than just foreboding shot like the original was, I didn’t look back.
I’m definitely guilty of over-editing photos (which I never end up releasing) but maybe in the end I can’t be blamed for doing so when it can yield results that end up mesmerising me.
