Over the last few months my son Ben has become quite an
accomplished guitar player. For his 18th birthday he bought a Charvel
Desolation Single Cut DS-1 Floyd Rose guitar in Flat Black. It’s a spectacular
guitar and I thought it might be nice to shoot a portrait session with him and
the guitar.
I wanted to create the impression that he was being lit by a
spotlight whilst maintaining the detail in the guitar. The lighting needed to
be subtle but at the same time strong enough to bring out any detail.
I tried several different lighting set ups but finally
settled on the one below.
I set up two speedlights. The first was a Nikon SB910 set to
manual at ½ power. It was stood on a lighting stand through as 24”
shoot-through umbrella. The light was positioned directly in front of him slightly higher than his face.
The second was a Nikon SB600 with a 22.5 degree grid. This
was set on a stand and aimed directly at his right hand, set to manual and
reduced to ¼ power.
Both speedlights were controlled using the pop-up flash on
the D300s in commander mode.
I took a few test shots so that I could establish the optimum
position for the lights to create the effect I was after. Shooting in RAW I decided
to slightly underexpose the shot so that I’d have some room for movement when I
got the image in Adobe Camera RAW.
Below is the start image in ACR. As you can see the effect
is almost there. It just needed a few adjustments to bring out the detail.
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| Initial Image in Adobe Camera RAW |
I lifted the exposure and also added a little fill light. I
increased the blacks slightly and also added some clarity and vibrancy. The
final ACR image is below.
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| Adjusted Image in Adobe Camera RAW |
After launching it into Photoshop CS5 it was now time
to give it an edgy, gritty look. I decided to do this using Nik COLOR EFEX PRO4.
There were a few filters I could have chosen but the one that gave me the look
I wanted was the Bleach Bypass filter. Using the pre-sets I selected the one
that I liked the look of and used it without any further tweaking.
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| Color Efes Pro |
Once back in CS5 the one thing I did notice was that the
filter had exaggerated some of the defects in the wall behind my subject. I
eliminated most of the larger defects using the spot healing brush but I chose
to leave some a the smaller ones to add to the gritty look. Lastly I added some Film Grain just to give it
a final edge.
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| Final image adjustments in Adobe Photoshop CS5 |
This is the final image which came out pretty much exactly
as I wanted it to. Very Pleased as was my subject.
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| Final Image |
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