Pete Barnes - Wakefield Wedding Photographer » colour

Modelling with my coloured backgrounds

Pete Barnes — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:46:38 +0000

I’ve recently got some coloured gels for my studio lights as I wanted to do something a little different than the white background studio photography shots. The background is just grey but if you put a gel in front of the background light you can turn it any colour you like and as the colour of the background can really alter the mood of a photo, they are very handy to have. The lighting was a little more sophisticated than my usual lifestyle portraits so we couldn’t do a lot of moving about but as I was just doing test shots it was no big deal. So with the help of a very photogenic friend I did a few test shots and was quite happy with how they came out. Although she isn’t a model, she is very comfortable in front of the camera, I knew this as I covered her wedding last year (she was the bride going over the stepping stones at Bolton Abbey). It’s always easy to work with people who are very natural when they are having the photo taken, be it in the studio or out and about. I might look at doing some time for print shots with models looking to build up their portfolios as it’s mutually beneficial, but that’s probably a bit down the road.

Model portrait photography with colourful backgrounds

Lighting wise I used a beauty lighting setup where there was a large softbox overhead providing top down lighting and a large triflector in front and below bouncing back up to the models face, there was also two lights to the left and right behind the model providing a little hair and rim lighting, these were small speedlights. The forth light was my background light with the coloured gels, the tone of the background depended on the power of the background light, if I wanted a light, hi key tone I put it up quite high, if I wanted a darker more saturated tone I lowered it, this gave me a good range with each colour. The shots were taken with a 70-200 lens at f/11, ISO 100. Thanks for looking guys.

Newmillerdam in Autumn

Pete Barnes — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:06:54 +0000

Newmillerdam near Wakefield in Autumn with tree leaves starting to turn

The light was looking nice yesterday, which might be the last nice day for a while looking at the reports, so I decided to potter down to Newmillerdam. This is a country park not far from where I live and for some reason I never quite get what I want when I go. I was actually after a sunlight through the trees type shot but the autumn colours on the far bank looked a better bet. The thick ND filter slowed the water down and sent the colours haywire, I didn’t pull the reds back too far as they suited the subject. I struggled a little for foreground interest, I finally decided on the tree roots breaking the surface might act as a leading line toward the building (a boathouse I think, there is a cafe in it actually) and the trees. The exposure was 15 seconds so there was a little movement in the leaves to the bottom right but I thought I could let it go. The rest of the settings were ISO200, 19mm at f/8.

Mustang at a Wedding

Pete Barnes — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:13:33 +0000

Bride and Groom kissing after the wedding with a classic red ford mustang car IMG_6044-2-Edit

I was looking through some recent (ish) wedding shots we had done and found this one. The Bride and Groom were after a few colour isolation (spot colouring) shots where one colour stands out while the rest is black and white. This technique has been around for a while (it was big in the movie Sin City) and I use it occasionally if the shot is appropriate. This classic Ford Mustang was screaming to be spot coloured, the bridesmaids were also in red so we used the same technique on some of their shots too.
It is easy enough to do in Lightroom, on the HSL panel you just drop all the saturations to -100 then bring the reds (and some of the yellow) back up to 0 (or over). The problem with doing this on red is it leaves some colour on the skin giving ‘not long dead’ look, not great for wedding photography. This is easily solved with the local adjustment brush, set the saturation to -100 and paint over where you want it to get desaturated ie the skin.
I played around with the image a little more to give a more 3D cartoony type look which I find works well with spot colouring. I also personalised the number plate for the couple, just little details I think every wedding photographer should look to add if possible.