June 30, 2008
The Lightroom 2 book photo shoot
All reportage photos © Jeff Schewe
Earlier, in March this year, George Jardine from Adobe and Jeff Schewe came over to London to help document a fashion photo shoot that I shot specifically for the next revision of my Lightroom book. The background to this is that the publisher, Peachpit and myself thought it would be a good idea to carry out a studio photo shoot in which I could use the photographs that were taken on the day to illustrate a complete Lightroom workflow, using the latest version of the program. As well as capturing some great looking images, I also hoped to find a new cover image for the book, and in addition to this, Adobe have also requested to use some of these pictures as demo assets for Lightroom and other Adobe product presentations. Incidentally, the finished book will now be ready to go on sale as soon as Lightroom 2 officially ships.
You can find out more about the shoot itself by checking out the video George Jardine made while he was in London, which shows the progress of the shoot from concept, through to model casting and creating the finished looks. There is also a separate video podcast that George produced which shows me going through the pictures at the editing stage and discussing which shots worked best and why.
To accompany the video podcast, here are a few snaps that Jeff Schewe shot on the day of the shoot.
This is me coming up the stairs to the studio in North London, helping Harriet, the clothes stylist by bringing up some of the clothes that would be used for the shoot. It was early March in London and the weather was still rather cold.
Here is George looking somewhat excited at the prospect of the shoot that lay ahead (or was it the local expresso coffee he had earlier?)
Here is Jeff getting in on the action as my wife, Camilla gets stated on the makeup for our first model, Yuliya.
In this shot you can see Camilla at work from above, while Harriet looks on.
An overhead view of Camilla’s makeup kit that was used on the day.
During the setup process it is always handy to have my assistant, Harry stand in to carry out lighting tests. The main aim here was to check that the background lighting was nice and even.
As you can see, I used a dual monitor setup with an iMac running Windows XP and with Lightroom on the secondary screen. Check out this link for the story about how I have optimized everything for shooting tethered with the Canon EOS 1Ds MkIII camera and Lightroom.
Meanwhile, or chef Marie Claire was hard at work preparing another lovely lunch for everyone who was working on the shoot that day.
On the menu we had chicken and peppers with courgettes and potatoes.
This is our hair stylist, Terry Calvert, as he worked on Yuliya’s hair. I have known and worked with Terry for almost 25 years now and he has achieved a huge number of awards in the UK hairdressing industry and been inducted into the British hairdressing hall or fame
This was our second model, Lucy, having her hair washed
This was the first shot of the day, where I wanted to achieve a simple beauty head shot using a single soft box light. I normally prefer to shoot handheld.
But it helps to have the wheely stool to sit on as well sometimes!
I think George got that shot covered OK.
It can sometimes be tricky to setup a tethered connection and keep everything working smoothly, but when it is working correctly it is the fastest way I know of to get photos from the camera to the computer. This shot has neatly captured the workstation setup and shows the photos streaming into the Lightroom program on the screen on the right.
After completing a shoot I can review the pictures one by one to make a rough edit and then shortlist the favourite pictures that I like best at this stage.
The next step is to quickly go to the Print module, select a contact sheet print template and instruct Lightroom to print these in draft mode.
What I like about Lightroom is that it only takes a few seconds to generate the print files for say 100 selected shots and the printer will then soon whizz into action. This was one of the last times I used the old Epson 1290. I now find that the Epson R1900 is an excellent printer for contact sheet work in the studio, it’s really fast compared to the old 1290.
Here is a shot of some of the contact sheets.
And here is me sorting through the contact sheet prints with George filming and Rod Wynne-Powell looking on. Rod stopped by to say hello briefly and for those who don’t know, Rod has been the tech editor for all my Photoshop books and is now an author himself of the latest Mac OS X for Photographers book.
I did a second shot of Yuliya, this time using Jeff’s 16-35mm Canon zoom lens. I like using extreme wide angle lenses for some of my shots and this lens worked great. It also gave Jeff the chance to make me look like David Hemmings in ‘Blow-up‘ (I wish).
More shots to review on the workstation.
I know some photographers have mixed views about allowing others to see the results of a shoot while the shoot is in progress. There are times where it is a distraction, but on the other hand it is useful sometimes to be able to let the models see how they are looking.
This shows the first shot I took of our second model, Lucy. Again, using the simple soft box lighting setup.
Time for a break as Marie Claire serves up lunch to Lucy and Terry
This shows Lucy being photographed with the HMI spot lighting setup, in which I was striving for a more dramatic and moody lighting effect.
This setup also worked well with our last model, Kelly. Interestingly, this shot that Jeff took is completely different to all the ones that I took of Kelly from front on and provided some useful inspiration of how to approach this kind of shot setup in future.
This was the very last shot of the day and my last chance to find a cover shot that I could use for the book. The lighting was real simple, just two spot lights and an LED light bank (courtesy of George) that Harry, my assistant was able to hand hold for me to get the front lighting balance just right.
Here you can see the captured photos coming into Lightroom and the finished cover image can be seen below after I had dulled down the colours and added a split tone effect to get the colour look that I was after.
Many thanks to everyone who was involved with the shoot: Camilla Pascucci who did makeup, Harriet Cotterill who took care of the clothes styling, Terry Calvert of Clipso for the hair, Harry Dutton my assistant, Marie Claire for providing us with lunch and the models: Yuliya from Zone, Lucy from Bookings and Kelly from Zone. Also thank you to photographer Stuart Weston for prroviding the LH2 studio. And lastly, a big thank you to George Jardine and Jeff Schewe for documenting the shoot that day.
The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 book
The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 book, by Martin Evening and published by Adobe Press (Peachpit) will be available for purchase at the same time as the official launch of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, from the usual book shops and on-line book stores.
Now available at Amazon for advanced orders
The new book will be fully updated for all the new changes to the program since version 1.0 and contain 624 pages.
ISBN: 0-321-55561-9
List Price: $49.99 (US)