When on a photoshoot, there are a ton of choices to be made and I thought I'd let you in on why a chose to shoot and process a photo the way I did.
This is Cabrillo College safety Derrick Morgan, who was our featured player for the Cabrillo College football preview story in the football special section of the Santa Cruz Sentinel. I shot four kids for the special section, Morgan and three high school guys. One was for the cover and the others were for the league preview stories. I wanted them to all be shot the same way so there was a continuity throughout the section. Last year I did environmental portraits, so this year it was natural to try some studio shots.
I knew exactly how I wanted to light the shots. I have small strobes on either side of the subject into umbrellas and a larger strobe as the key light to camera left into a softbox. I've seen this style of lighting called the "three-light gritty look" and is very popular these days. The reason I like it is because it gives the photo a lot of "pop" and when printing on a newspaper, you need all the pop you can get. Newspapers suck the quality out of a photo, so the highlights created by this setup make it an ideal choice.
I had all the players assume various football-related poses for their shots. Some worked out better than others, but hey, finding out what doesn't work is part of the fun. This shot (which didn't run in the paper) was tough because the ball would usually create a shadow in the player's face, but Derrick was able to toss it more to his side and eliminate that issue.
While I like this photo, it didn't run in the newspaper because of his white jersey. Exposing for his dark skin started to blow out the highlights of the uniform, which would look like a giant white spot in the paper. So I had him switch to his home jersey and we grabbed the safe shot that ran with his story.
It's all about choices.
Processing was very simple for this photo. From Lightroom I opened the photo as a smart object into Photoshop and then right clicked on the layer and selected "new smart object via copy." Next I double-clicked on this layer to bring up Adobe Camera Raw. Just change the photo to grayscale and hit OK. Now change the blending mode to "hard light."
Apply the filter "Other > High Pass" and chose a radius of about 20 or so. I had some halos around him on the backdrop, so I masked the backdrop out. Then I could double click the High Pass smart filter and readjust it to my liking.
That's it. May have sounded more complicated that it actually was, but give it a try anyway.
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