Lisa Cvach
asked me recently if I’d do some photographs for publicity for the Paradise Valley Community College
Fitness Center. I was happy to help
out. If the fitness center was a corporate client, I
would have charged of course. I mean,
you wouldn’t ask your car repair guy or medical doctor for free services; I get
that. But this is to help out colleagues
at my college. Plus, darn it, it’s work
sure, but it’s fun!
When I walked
into the fitness center I noticed Lisa trying to take photos using a small
point and shoot camera. What she said to me was
pretty important. “How do you get the
background to blur?” That’s why I’m glad
I took my flash with me.
My models
this day are Fred from the fitness center and Shay. Now, look at Shay. The pressure is on me not to make her look
bad. Sorry Fred but Shay is the star of
this shoot!
My camera
body is the Canon
5D Mark III, using a 24-105mm
Canon “L” lens and the new Canon
600ex-rt flash. Shooting without
flash under fluorescent light could be done, but with a much higher ISO and
more grain. I wanted to use flash to
highlight the subjects and to darken the background some. To make sure I had a fairly dark background,
I used a shutter speed of 1/125 and faster.
Plus, I used Lightroom 4 in post production and could brush a darker exposure
around the background, as you’ll see in many of the examples here and in the
slideshow at the bottom of the blog.
I shot
everything in manual mode. For some
shots, I used direct flash and turned down the power; for others, I used
modified flash using a simple white card to reflect for softer light.
For the
panorama of the fitness center, I took seven photos vertically set to aperture
priority and available light, then combined them in Photoshop CS6, then I
applied HDR (high dynamic range) toning to produce the effect you see in the
photo at the top of the blog.
Happy Shooting!
Jim
Patterson
…And, here are all the photos from the fitness center
shoot!
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