Summer photo shoots are few and far between here in Misawa, Japan. The weather is miserable and the lack of A/C here makes people less inclined to dress up and get portraits done. I spend most of my summer taking pictures of the kids.

Needing to diversify my 2012 portfolio, I asked one of my friends if I could borrow her daughter, Sarai, for a photo shoot. She's the pretty girl in the picture above. She graciously said yes and we went to one of the most popular places in town for shoots. I haul quite a bit of equipment with me sometimes and wanted to use some additional gear (mostly a reflector). My 2, soon to be 8 year old, twins volunteered to help. I say volunteered but in all actuality, I had to bribe them again. They definitely earned their pay by keeping the lights steady and shining the reflector where I needed it.

I used a 600w/s Monolight turned up to a little less than 1/2 power with a Softlighter II attached. To keep the best picture quality, my ISO was set at 100. Without the monolight, the picture would be really dark at that ISO. My aperture was set at f2.8 and my shutter speed was 1/80th. We had just moved from a sunny area to this shady spot. Normally my shutter speed would be around 1/180 and up but I had a ND4 filter on. I pressed on without taking it off due to time constraints and mosquitoes!!

The shot below is SOOC (straight out of camera). It’s not bad at all but as you can see, I got part of my lightstand on the left. The overall tone is a little flat so I wanted to bump of the warmth. I also added some more contrast to make the background a little less distracting. Next I added a bit of skin smoothing and then sharpened. I did all my editing in Photoshop CS5 minus the crop which I did in Lightroom 4.

Here’s the edited version below. Better?

I’ll break down editing in Photoshop one of these days. Probably when I’m stuck in the house during the long winter that’ll be here in a few weeks and I have more time. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask!

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Best wishes,

-Michael