I approached Lola about doing a photo of her and her husband, an amazing photographer that goes by Springheel, at a photo event this summer.  After tossing some concepts around we settled on a homage to this David and Goliath painting. Springheel is best known for his horror works and I thought it would play well as a fun portrait.
This is the first of what will be two or three posts to walk through my process in creating the image.  In some ways it could easily be seen as a tutorial.  I am not calling it a tutorial though.  This will not be step by step, nor will it be completely instructional.  I have already made the image and I am just walking back over what I have done.
I use adobe photoshop and adobe lightroom.  Though in theory the methods are translatable into other software.
This first post is going to cover how things were shot with the camera.  And the initial processing in Lightroom.
I think of Lightroom as developing. I try to do as much of my actual adjustments to photos there. Then editing is done in photoshop. I like the tools in lightroom better for adjusting the files, and it seems like a nice logical break in the process.

Shooting Lola

The above are the settings for the shot I eventually settled on.  I was shooting at ISO400 more for the head than anything else.  I shoot with a D50 and ISO400 has a little bit of noise when you push the shadows in post process I wanted the noise to go with the eventual grungey brushing I would be doing.  I am shooting wide (20mm) and from a low angle so that her hand would be exaggerated and I could have the head take a significant place in the frame.  I was shooting at 9.5 hoping to keep things sharp.  In actuality her two closest fingers are not nearly as sharp as I had hoped but they end up hidden in the shadows in the final image so all was well.

Both Lola and Springheel were lit with a SB25 speedlight at 1/2 (or 1/4) power using a DIY beauty dish made from a turkey pan.  I handheld the light and tried numerous angles.  The beauty dish provides a directions soft light that fades off quickly Which is nice whe you want things to “emerge” from the darkness.

Springheel was shot with very similar settings.  I tried to keep in mind the angles of light I had for Lola and give myself as many options as possible as far as heads to choose from.  He wore a black shirt and another was wrapped around his neck in order to isolate his head as much as possible.

This is all the images from the shoot. I went through and marked picks and rejects. The rejects are marked greyed out here. One of the nicest features about Lightroom is the options it offers for going through and editing down a shoot. I mark things with flags and stars to make selections and then I use colors to denote other things. For instance above the final completed piece is labeled in blue. I will also use colors sometimes for alternate crops of pieces or older/newer edits.

After a couple of passes I narrow my selection for the Lola image down to three, they are marked using stars, and using filters I narrow my view to choose one to work on. The Survey view is great for this, its like having all the images laid out on a table and narrowing them down. Its nice to be able to see them all at once. (The survey view button is circled above in the lower left.)

During the selection process I applied a base color adustment to all the files. For the purposes of this review I had removed it from the Image of Lola I used, this is why the color is different from the other two above. The color adjustment is the result of a downloaded preset, that I have then edited to make my own version. The majority of the effect comes from the split tone slider adding some warm gold color into the highlights.

The rest of the adjustment process for Lola’s image is pretty straight forward the majority of the sliders used are above. The blacks are pushed up to knock out detail from the background and the lights are pushed up to bring her out of it. There is not an exact science to this I just play with it until I get what I like.

The adjusted image is then moved into photoshop so I can use it to compare heads. This process was straight forward and it took 3 tries. I would bring an adjusted head into photoshop and move it around to see how it looked. We are skipping it here so that we stay in Lightroom. I will show some of it in the later post.

Prepping the Head

A similar set of concerns and goals existed for the head so the sliders look similar here.  In both cases the exposure is pushed way up and this brings more noise into the shadows.

I also used 3 adjustment brushes. Two outside his head to get rid of parts of the shirt that had caught light, and one to add light to the side of his head. I did this initially to make isolating his head in photoshop simpler, but I like the look of it and so it stayed that way even after cutting the head out. The red you see is the brushing for that adustment and then the accompanying sliders for it.

So That is pretty much it for Lightroom both of the resulting below images were then moved in to make the composite, which we will cover in the next post.