Daily Photo – Brigitte in Natural Light
The Daily Photo series focuses on the two or three key creative choices, in terms of composition and processing, that go into creating an image. Specific technical details about the shot have been left out — you won’t hear me talking about tone curve adjustments and whatnot unless it was a key component of the end result.
Here’s a shot of Brigitte taken in November at the home studio (which is to say, my living room).
Exposure
- Shutter: 1/500
- Aperture: f/4
- ISO: 200
- Camera: Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III
- Lens: Canon EF 50mm f/1.2L USM
Composition and Processing
- Even though this was taken indoors in a fairly small space, I wanted to create a sense of open-ness. To do that I cropped to exclude window borders in order to imply they might extend much farther than the edge of the frame. I also blew the image out to suggest much more light was streaming in than actually was (it’s getting close to sunset, but that doesn’t appear to be the case in the processed shot).
- The window makes a nice frame for Brigitte, with clean vertical and horizontal lines. The more interesting lines to me, and the reason I set this shot up, are the shadows running diagonally across the floor (from a short railing on the balcony out of frame to camera right; like I said, the sun was low). Those shadows create a kind of support for Brigitte and help add depth to the image, particularly since they get deeper in the foreground. They also line up with the very faint shadow generated by Brigitte herself.
Original:
February 17 2009 06:37 pm | Photography