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L'amour au sommet de la montagne
L'amour au sommet de la montagne
dwterry


Photograph Information Photographer's Comments
Challenge: Free Study 2008-08 (Advanced Editing VII)
Camera: Canon EOS-5D
Lens: Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM
Location: LaCaille Restaurant
Date: Aug 19, 2008
Aperture: f/3.5
ISO: 100
Shutter: 1/1600
Galleries: Portraiture, Wedding
Date Uploaded: Aug 31, 2008

 A beautiful bride in front of a lovely little French Restaurant on the bench of the Rocky Mountains in Salt Lake City.

(this place is absolutely gorgeous, I just wish I could have been there on an overcast day or be able to shoot later in the day to avoid the harsh sunlight)

Background info:
I was asked to do Bridals for a beautiful young lady at a very expensive but gorgeous french restaurant here in Salt Lake City, Utah. She chose this location because that is where she would be having her reception.

The restaurant, to my dismay, insisted that the bridal session begin at 3pm instead of 7pm like I wanted because by 5:30pm customers begin to arrive and they didn't want us or the customers to interfere with each other. (okay, it's a restaurant, I can understand that, even if I don't like the idea of shooting at 3pm).

So anyway, as we walked around the gorgeous settings (both inside and outside the restaurant), I quickly realized that all the best outdoor locations to shoot are only best when the sun is much lower in the sky or when the sky is overcast. Unlucky for me, the sky was completely devoid of clouds. I put off the outdoor shoot, starting inside the restaurant, hoping some clouds might appear, but had no such luck.

One of the scenes I felt I absolutely had to get, was right in front of the restaurant where I could get an "old cottage at the top of the mountains" appearance. The only trouble with this scene is that, at 4:00 in the afternoon, the sunlight is harshly lighting the cottage with a huge shadow (from the rest of the building) off to my right, with zero chance of getting a reflector into the sun that could redirect some of the light onto her.

I suppose I could have stuck the bride in the sun light, but I didn't want to do that. So I kept her in the shade and hoped I could compete with the sun using my flash. And besides, I was using my Canon 5D and felt I had a decent chance of pulling the details out of both highlights and shadows (I always shoot raw, and this is one instance that absolutely proves the benefits to doing so).

Well, if you remember how flash works, you set your flash exposure with your aperture and your ambient exposure with the shutter speed, right? So the best way to fight sunlight is to shoot with a large aperture and a fast shutter speed with the flash up close to the subject in High Speed Sync mode. And so this scene was shot at ISO 100, 1/1600th of a second and f/3.5.

Those settings would have been just fine, if I could get the flash in close enough to the bride to light her. And I was using RadioPoppers to fire my off camera flash (which I verified several times, it was working). But the trouble was, I wanted a) DIFFUSED light, using a shoot through umbrella which was stealing a lot of my light (but this was NOT the time to go for harsh lighting!), and b) a full length dress shot, with c) lots of surrounding area to complete that "cottage scene". But to get the "scene" the way I wanted, I just could not get the flash in close enough. And without getting the flash close enough, I was getting almost no help at all from the flash.

Here is what the scene looks like, straight out of Lightroom, with no adjustments at all (I hit the "reset" button on Lightroom to take the defaults):


As you can see, the exposure gave me lots of detail in the cottage to play with (I did NOT want to overexpose the cottage) but left the bride in the dark. (unfortunately, I didn't realize how badly she was in shadow until I saw the image in Lightroom for the first time - had I know the flash was this dark, I probably would have dropped the umbrella and gone for the harsher light)

Anyway, Adobe had just recently released Lightroom 2.0 with its new "Local Adjustment" capability. So I used the local adjustment brush as well as a few other settings and came up with this image (straight out of Lightroom with no PS work):


And so that was the image the bride saw and that was the one she wanted me to print for her. Good thing I didn't just throw my hands in the air and claim that the exposure was too hard to shoot.

So before going into Photoshop, I felt the main thing I wanted to do was to give this scene more of a "fairy tale" look. And that is something almost foreign to me because, for the most part, I like my pictures to look like pictures as they come out of the camera, without a lot of "post processing frilliness" to ruin them!

But to get the fairy tale look, I felt I had to blur some of the cottage to give it more of a dream like appearance and perhaps exaggerate some of the colors. Meanwhile, I still felt it needed to look like a real picture, so I kept some of the sharpness even while adding the blur.

Anyway, that is how this image came to be. It's a LOT more PP work that I normally do and I wasn't sure how the voters would react. As you can see by the votes ... some really liked it, some really didn't. But I'm fairly happy with me score and the bride absolutely loved the picture!

More of her pictures (engagements, bridals, wedding) can be seen on my website here:
//www.dterryphotography.com/MattAndMarissa

Statistics
Place: 60 out of 487
Avg (all users): 6.3374
Avg (commenters): 7.3125
Avg (participants): 6.2880
Avg (non-participants): 6.5000
Views since voting: 1712
Views during voting: 258
Votes: 163
Comments: 23
Favorites: 7 (view)

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AuthorThread
Canon EOS-5D Mark II
Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM
 09/11/2008 03:31:40 PM
The picture looks great! I like the effect you've done. Honestly, I think it should have scored higher. Really nice!
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Canon EOS-5D Mark II
Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM
 09/08/2008 02:43:22 PM
Mate, you are a constant inspiration to me and my wedding photography. Seriously, you are one wedding `tog I have enormous respect for. Great post-processing. Bet she went wild for this image.

nice one!
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max
Tamron SP AF 17-50mm f/2.8 Di II LD Aspherical (IF) for Nikon
 09/08/2008 12:50:55 AM
Well, congrats on a successful effort! And thanks much for the full explanation. It really helps to see what's possible in editing. :)
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Apple iPhone 13 Pro
Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM
 09/08/2008 12:12:24 AM
You got robbed!!!
  Photographer found comment helpful.
 Comments Made During the Challenge
Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III
Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0 L IS
 09/07/2008 07:58:50 PM
Really nice processing to make this almost fairytale-like.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Nikon Z8
Nikon NIKKOR Z 28-400mm f/4-8
 09/07/2008 11:57:03 AM
Pretty scene but the bride looks kind of cartoonish to me.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Nikon D7100
Nikon AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G IF-ED
 09/06/2008 09:59:07 AM
Cool dreamy quality, but it's just a bit too overprocessed for my tastes. Lose the halos and I think you would really nail it though.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Nikon D7000
Nikon AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR II
 09/05/2008 06:20:17 AM
Very interesting processing. Nice image and colours. I like how vivid and bright the model looks in it.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0 L IS USM
 09/04/2008 07:34:33 PM
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO david, awesomeness is your name! La caille! its a lot more colorfull then when i visited, it was snowing at the time. rocken
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Canon EOS-7D
Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6
 09/04/2008 01:56:47 PM
Great processing
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Canon EOS-7D
Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM
 09/04/2008 07:12:48 AM
I like the scene but seems a little over saturated imho
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Sony DSLR-A100
 09/03/2008 08:11:00 PM
I love the picture but its a little to Fairy Tale for me (8)
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Canon EOS-7D
Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM
 09/03/2008 10:09:48 AM
I shall be interested to see what processing was used - this is like a picturebook image. Nice composition and very colourful.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Canon EOS-450D Rebel XSi
Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6
 09/03/2008 09:15:33 AM
Great shot, very story book.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Sony DSLR-A100
Sony DT 16-80mm f/3.5-4.5 ZA
 09/03/2008 08:41:41 AM
I feel the processing takes too much focus away from the bride - this should be her shot! Maybe if she was a little further to the left with a darker background she would stand out a little more.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Canon PowerShot SD400
 09/03/2008 02:02:08 AM
Amazing! Much better than all the wedding photographers I have looked at. Are you available next fall? haha just kidding.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Nikon D7000
Nikon AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G IF-ED
 09/02/2008 09:17:35 PM
For some photos this would definitely be over done, but here the processing serves to give the photo a fairytailish quality. One of my favs in the challenge, and that's saying a lot.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Canon EOS-7D
Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0 L IS
 09/02/2008 08:59:02 PM
I'm 68% through voting and this becomes only my second 10/10 shot, great processing, I really hope that when I come back after voting your comments section tells us about the processing, faving too!
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Nikon D80
Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 DC Macro for Nikon
 09/02/2008 12:51:02 PM
like the fairy tale look. good luck
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Canon EOS-400D Rebel XTi
Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM
 09/01/2008 08:37:00 PM
little dark..but I like 7
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Nikon D200
Nikon AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR II
 09/01/2008 11:17:19 AM
This is just amazingly beautiful! I love the vibrancy of the colors and softness of the image. Well done!
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Nikon Z8
Nikon NIKKOR Z 24-120 f/4 S
 09/01/2008 07:50:24 AM
almost dreamlike, a bit too graphic in its processing for my taste, but it is well composed and delivered
  Photographer found comment helpful.
Nikon Z9
Nikon AF Nikkor 20mm f/2.8D
 09/01/2008 02:17:05 AM
Nice seen, too bad for the over processing though.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
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