I love writing reviews but sometimes I want to change things up a teeny bit, write something a little different and show a side other than 'look at what i got, listen to my opinions'. So when ONE person suggested I put together an updated 'how I shoot and edit my photos' post, I was like yeah; I want to do that. So here we are, a post only one person wanted to see and only one person wanted to write. Ridiculous, but i'm feeling it. If you have zero interest in this level of information then don't feel like you're missing out on anything by not reading this.
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I guess the first thing I should tackle is kit. I own a Canon 350D, it is beyond obsolete. They stopped making these in 2005(?) and I got mine second hand in 2012-ish. I used to own a great little 50mm f/1.8 lens but then my tripod fell over and the whole thing split into many pieces so now i'm stuck with my 18-55mm lens. I have a second hand tripod, it's just over 5' tall. I use a generic camera remote that can be bought off ebay for less than £3. Occasionally when he's feeling generous and i'm feeling lazy I get my Beau to play tripod as it gives me more freedom to try new poses and have different angles in my photosets.
I shoot in RAW format to have a bit more quality to play with. Since my camera is so rubbish, and my lighting may not be perfect, RAWs allow me to edit a lot of this out without compromising on the quality of the photo until I compress it into a jpg. They do take up more space on my camera and hard drive though (macbook airs are great at everything but storage) so it's rare I actually keep copies of them.
And i guess here's really where the 'magic' happens. A great photographer doesn't have to rely on editing to make photos look amazing, I am not a photographer let alone a great photographer. Without editing my photos look like pure shite. I used to use a free Chinese online editing software for all my editing and it served me well for a decent chunk of time but eventually I migrated to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5. As far as cosmetic changes go, it only has the clone and heal tools and the rest is just playing with levels. Lightroom 5 (and maybe others, I don't really know) has this great function where you can save the exact changes you've made to a photo as a present so it makes it ridiculously easy to edit an entire photoset the same way and keep that editing style for future use.
I usually just play about until I don't hate a photo but I figured i'd talk through some examples to show my workflow, if I have any at all:
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| Aperture f/4.5 | Shutter speed 1/500 | ISO 1600 |
Possibly my most loved, stolen and commented on photo of all time, this shot of my Recherche set was actually taken by my Beau on my instruction with my 18-55mm lens on a 34mm zoom.
I stole an IKEA chair from the hallway of my building for this set and just draped a white blanket over one of the arms for no real reason. I also actually thought I was going to have to re-shoot this entire set because i'd accidentally left my ISO too high (my camera can't handle anything above 600 really without adding insane noise) but then I was lazy and just went with it.
Honestly, looking at it now, it clearly didn't need much doing to it. The captured white balance was pretty spot on and there was nothing to clone out so I: increased highlights (+100), decreased shadows (-42), decreased white clipping (-93), increased black clipping (+8), decreased vibrance (-19) and decreased saturation (-18), decreased contrast (-20), decreased exposure to (-0.5), decreased clarity (-17) and saturation (-18).
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| Aperture f/3.2 | Shutter speed 1/30 | ISO 400 |
This photoset was also shot with Beau playing tripod with my 50mm lens.
I literally just stood in front of my bedroom wall which just so happens to have a monochrome vibe and it all kind of worked out nicely.
I adjusted my white balance to have the white wall be recognised as the white point first. I then cropped out the pillow at the bottom and the bulldog clips at the top and made minor adjustments to the angle to try and get the photo frames looking straight (photo walls are a nightmare backdrop because unless you're dead centre with your camera placement, they all look wonky!). I then irritatingly applied a present i'd named 'hmm' (I usually name my presets after the lingerie so I know where they originated) and I have no idea specifically what levels that altered but clearly my thought process on this one was to go through all my previous edits and just find one that looked good for this photoset (I do this a lot). I also went in with the mask tool which allows you to play with the levels in specific areas of a photo and made the shadows a little less harsh.
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| Aperture f/2.2 | Shutter speed 1/80 | ISO 400 |
These were taken with a tripod and my 50mm lens.
I stood with one foot on my coffee table, the other on my couch to get the right height and a flattering angle/not have lots of crap in the background. My abs were looking ridiculous because I was calorie restricting/eating cleaner on top of my usual workouts and even i'm jealous when looking at these photos (but life without bread and on 1200 calories a day is not worth it)
For this set I just re-set the white balance using the wall in the background, increased the exposure (0.25) and increased the sharpness (also using the mask tool to go over the patches and increase their clarity in some photos to make sure the text stood out). Most of my time was spent with the clone/heal tool. I was going through some pretty big hormonal bollocks right here and as you can see it was fucking with my skin big time so I edited that out. I also weirdly cropped this photo to an entirely different aspect ratio, something i never do, but hey I wanted my chin removed and clearly I didn't hold down the shift key.
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| Aperture f/4 | Shutter speed 1/25 | ISO 400 |
Another photoset my Beau played tripod for (which is hilarious because 90% of my photos are taken by me, I guess I just kept the RAW files for more of his shots) using my 18-55mm lens with no zoom.
I'd just got my new headboard, a large canvas print of one of my friend Bryony Good's photos and I was jazzed to have it as a backdrop (I also have another of her photos to interchange with this one as a headboard for funsies). Her photos remind me of home, and even though this one is most definitely not of home, everything about her work screams Yorkshire to me and it's a comforting feeling. So I wanted to match the hardness of the print on the headboard with the hardness of the lingerie but then diffuse it with soft textiles. I don't know what I was thinking with the fairy lights...
I removed some spots, set the white balance using the small patch of wall and then got to work on my levels: decreased contrast (-31), decreased exposure (-0.2), decreased highlights (-10), increased shadows (+100), decreased white clipping (-70), increased black clipping (+15), decrease saturation (-23), increase vibrance (+8).
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| Aperture f/6.3 | Shutter speed 1/15 | ISO 400 |
This was a tripod shot with my 50mm lens at my mother's house (yeah I do often travel with my full kit to take advantage of having new places in which to shoot when i'm feeling particularly uninspired).
I was exhausted and struggling with my anxiety, not to mention i'd just spent my christmas dealing with major floods and helping clean up my little town. But i'd had this set for way too long and not reviewed it, a mouse had nibbled through the cotton gusset (don't ask) and i just wanted it all out of the way since there was a designer waiting patiently for my blog post. So I rolled out of bed, and just shot in the very stark morning light. I took about 5 photos before giving up and thankfully I had some useable ones.
I removed some spots and got rid of the clutter in the bottom right corner with the clone/heal tool. I then just applied the preset i'd made of my Recherche shoot above and voilà, good to go.
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| Aperture f/5.6 | Shutter speed 1/25 | ISO 400 |
This is my most recent shoot, for a blog post that isn't even live yet, and was taken using a tripod and my 18-55mm lens with a 47mm zoom.
I'd literally just got home from work around 6pm-ish, the weather was vile so the light was super dark but this set had just arrived and I was excited so i thought i'd do a test shoot. Couldn't find any nude stockings anywhere so just went with knitted socks... I basically just threw a blanket over my couch, put a faux fur stole over that and then moved my large photo (which is huge and i've never got round to hanging it in this apartment even though i've been here 3 years so lives behind my couch) so it was in the background. Tripod was perched precariously on top of my coffee table, my couch is directly in front of my window (well like 4 metres away) so I wanted to minimise the appearance of shadows from the tripod so above was kind of the best bet. For this shot I increased the zoom to get more of a details shot than full body.
As far as my edit went for this shoot, it was pretty different to my usual style, washing everything out just wasn't working at all. So I went a bit mad and I: increased exposure (+0.45), increased brightness (+61), increased contrast (+25), decreased the temperature, increased the tint, increased clarity (+41), increased vibrance (+22), increased saturation (+1), played with split toning so my highlights had a yellow hue and my shadows had a purple hue and then messed with my tone curve a bit for good measure.
So that's pretty much it, I export my photos to jpg, upload them to flickr and add them to blog posts. Usually I aim to have three photos per blog post and one or two that are different for social media but I don't enforce this strictly. Sometimes i'm just happy to have any photos I like at all.
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Sorry if this was a long, rambling post but i've had some fun putting it together and it's been interesting to analyse my own workflows. I can now see why some people say I definitely have a photographic style, I clearly just love certain editing techniques and just endlessly recreate them without realising i'm doing it. Whoops!