50 Shades of Gary

'Gary regretted asking Laura what her new book was about.'

The re-editing of ‘old’ images is not a process I’m keen on. When you shoot and edit an image it represents where you are in that moment of time, both in your abilities and your way of thinking.  

Yesterday I re-edit one of my old images, a photo I took 583 days ago! The reason is pretty exciting, I was contacted last Thursday about the possibility of using my work in a new book on self portraiture. I’m not sure how many of my images will be used or to what extent but having only previously been published in a magazine in India I’m over the moon.

The image that brought my work to their attention was one I uploaded to flickr on 23^rd January 2011, week 4 of my 52 weeks of humiliation project. They asked me to send some of my self portraits across with some details so I sent some of my newer and in my opinion better work. I got an email back asking for this image too.

Not a problem, I love the concept of this image, it still makes me laugh! Almost 7 thousand views on flick isn’t bad going so people seem to like it (although I’m sure Lauras arse helped with the stats.) Even though when I shot it I barely knew how to turn on my camera, and this was in fact one of my first experiments with off camera flash, apart from being a little underexposed the RAW file isn’t too bad.

The edit however is pretty awful. Underexposed, dull highlights, distractions that could easily be removed and horrible HDR’d skin tones. So I thought I would start afresh.

No HDR this time, I’ve been HDR clean for months now and never felt better. Using the exposure settings on the RAW file I exposed twice, once for Lauras legs and once for me and blended together using a layer mask.

To make sure the viewers eye went first to my face and then followed my eyes to Laura I need to remove some distractions. I’m lent up a cupboard, on top is a load of crap and above is a light wall. The clutter on top I should of dealt with while shooting, that’s laziness and lack of experience, but I decided I was going to get rid of the whole wall as your eye stops there first. Also the white skirting board is far lighter than anything else in frame, I contemplated extending the curtains to the floor but decided to just tone them down, I feel leaving them in gives a definition to the room and where I am.

So my new edit isn't massivley different, just a few minor tweak with exposure and a little after thought on the composition & what's in frame... But is the new edit better or should I of left it as it was? What’s your view on re-editing your old work? I'd like to know peoples thoughts.

Here's the original... (new at the top)

Smoke Bombs...

 "Just hanging around in a shed full of smoke in a dress... like you do."

How much smoke does a smoke bomb let off? A LOT! That’s what I learnt creating this shot.

Laura was kind enough again to let me use her as a sexy crash test dummy in my attempts to become better at model portraits. I seriously don’t see this as where my future in photography lays but I want to improve none the less.

Yet again the ‘Urbex Shed’ was my location. I was unsure about using the smoke bombs here, the roof is full of holes and I could imagine if smoke started pouring out the roof of my shed in the middle of town it’s not going to attract the right kind of attention…

I had an idea of what I wanted to achieve. Laura stood just inside the door, with a gridded light on her from the front and a big light source coming through the door behind. The smoke was required not to look like the place is on fire but to make the light from outside show up better.

Once I got the lights set up (see below for details), I prepared the smoke bomb! I figured I only needed a little smoke so I would need to put if out before it filled the shed and alerted the attention of the emergency services… I taped the smoke bomb to a stick and filled a mop bucket full of cold water.

I lit the bomb, wafted the stick around like a camp wizard and then shoved the stick deep in the bucket… Oh… that doesn’t work! How can a bucket of cold water not stop it from smoking?!?! If anything it smoked more, the shed filled and I ran outside with my witches’ cauldron and attempted unsuccessfully to put it out…

The bomb ran its course, the back door to my house was open, downstairs was filled with smoke, the area I live in had a burny smelling blue haze in the air for the next 20 minutes. No firemen came though so all’s good!

Anyway, no one cares! I’m babbling.


Lighting:

 I used 2 lights for this shot. To light Laura I used a YN460ii in a gridded octobox over head on a boom looking down at her. It was maybe 2.5 meters away from her.

The second light was through the door, just a bare YN460ii pointing back into the room we are in and hitting Lauras back. Although I didn't get quite the look I was after, (light rays cutting through the smoke), I still think it looks pretty cool and I like the rim light that seperates her from the dark environment.

The Edit:

I know I know! Where's the smoke? This was my favourite shot... it was also the 3rd from last one and the smoke had mostly cleared. Fortunately I had the camera on a tripod so all the shots were composed (almost) the same. The smoke I used was actually from a shot the front light didn't fire on due to slow recycling time...

I brought the highlights in the dress out as it was a little flat. The only real other work I did was curves, some dodgy dodge & burning and colour toning.