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Choose Selects & Sort Images From Indoor Shoot

What I wanna start off with is the blank slates when I was just framing up the shot at the art studio. So these are literally every frame I took. As you'll see, there's 442. This includes the ones I've already imported from the card. So when I was looking at framing, and looking at camera settings, we'll open up the Info tab here in Capture One, you're gonna notice, these are pretty dark. But this is gonna show you the effect the ambient light had. So this is at f/8 at a 200th of a second at ISO 100. As we change, we're down to f/4. So f/8 to f/4, we opened up a couple stops. Now, we're starting to raise the ISO. We went from 100 to 200. So slowly I'm letting a little bit of ambient leak into the shot to up that mood. And then, until I get a comfortable spot. So it looks like there we are, we're at ISO 200, a 200th of a second at f/4 and 5500 white balance, as far as the Kelvin goes. So this is where I was happy with the shot. You know, having an overall feel that felt natural. But I k...

now if I shot her in this environment without any, adding any light, it would be really dark. So now we move on to introducing the subject and our lights. And you'll see, the light settings, I change them slowly as I go because the strobes they were bouncing around that room, having a white ceiling, having white walls, it started to affect things. So I left the ISO, the shutter speed is what I was lowering or raising to try and let in more window light without affecting my strobes. And eventually we found a happy medium and we just began to shoot. So once I found those settings, you'll see all of these are the same. So these are just the RAWs. And as we're going through, she was painting. I was liking what was going on here, but again, I didn't love it because the way her head was angled, with the hair and things like that. I just kept shooting, letting her work through her process and I'm not even really paying attention to what she's doing I'm looking at framing at this point. I'm thinking, all right, is this blow torch in the foreground too much? Do I need to zoom in, get some verticals? And I'm just kind of letting, letting everything happen, paying attention to what she's doing, only to the point where I actually see what I want. And I could tell we were getting closer. And I actually like when we zoomed in a little bit more. Getting some of these vertical overhead shots. And now is when I started to kind of have this realization, I'm like, oh, this is where all the sudden her chin is up, she's doing the action that I want, and her hair's not so much in her face because her chin's up. So it was just kind of letting it come together. I didn't know it was, how it was gonna happen. I just knew eventually it would hopefully happen. So I really liked this shot. This would be one I would mark. Oh, I did mark it. So I already started some of these. So at least I'm consistent. And then, as you'll see when we go through, I marked a bunch of these in a row because we hit a good point where everything was kind of working out pretty well. And then as I continue to look, I actually like that moment, too. We'll mark that now, after the fact. I like that the torch is barely in there, that she's kind of observing what she's doing. Again, I just continue to shoot. And I marked that one because I like that there's now some space around her head. It's not stuck in that artwork there. And it continued to be there for a while. And my light didn't fire. If you wanna know what it looks like with strobe and without, there you go. So that's what it looked like totally ambient, that's what it looks like when you add my light. So you can see my light's casting shadows from the ceiling lights, it's casting the shadows on the art. But as far as shadows, you know, these hard shadows on the wall from the torches, they're still there, my light's just shifting them from the left side to the right side. So it is how it looks naturally, it's just a different version. And she looks much better in my light than the natural light. So we'll keep going through here. I actually like, that one's all right. That one's pretty good. So I've marked some of these. Again, now we move to the overhead position. So I do like that, I love the frame. I'm, oh, I marked all these ones too. And as we continue through, I'm just experimenting with angles now. Because I felt like we got the shot we needed, I'm just seeing if there's anything in here that really works well for supplemental shots that I would present to a client or, you know, show my friends for feedback on if any of these spoke to them. As we go through, again, shooting a lot, just looking for, kind of like that one, I'll mark it. I like that one, the light on her face is really nice. That one's even more square and there's more space on the right. She's getting too far into those torches and off frame. I don't like that one as much. It's too busy behind her head. So she moves back. That's kind of a nice moment there. So we're, again, just filtering through it. I like that one. The way the head's angled towards the light, she's painting onto the, and that was it. So then we moved on. I did one, a couple light tests for this backlight shot. Actually, I just did one light test and then I was okay with moving to natural light. So we'll kind of sift through these really quickly. And again, I'm just looking for moments that everything's sharp, that her head's in a good place. So that would be one right there. And the action looks real. Got a couple of these detail shots. Again, those weren't shots I meant to take when I got to the shoot. They were just ones that worked out. A few more details. I like how she rotated, or how the plate there, or the panel rotated a little bit. So here it's just a little off-kilter. I like as it was getting more and more turned. It added a more interesting composition. Removing the wax from her tools. The whole works, inspecting everything. I didn't love the frame there. It looks like she's about to fall off the chair. That's what happens when you come partially untethered in mid-frame. Not ideal. And then a couple of the portraits. So I was telling her to smile. I wasn't, she clearly, it's just not her thing. So you gotta understand that. I thought, all right, fine, no more direction there. If she wants to smile, she had a great smile when it would naturally happen, when she'd start laughing or act like she was selling a torch or something. But the forced smile was not her thing. And you gotta understand that as a photographer. It's not always, it's not always the direction to give. Sometimes you've just gotta let things happen. So I'm marking a few of these. Strictly looking at the frame. I do enjoy that one quite a bit. I marked the next one, so it's basically the same. You can see, her head's just slowly, I'm just moving from left to right slowly. You can see her head move. And now we went on to this backlit one. This one was not working from the get-go, so I didn't spend much time on it. It was really hard to get the balance how I wanted without totally starting over and to me it wasn't worth it. So we're just gonna look at these. I think, yeah, that's about the only one because I'm actually square to the wall, the torch is there, so it's marked. We'll work on that one in a little bit. And now we're on to the portrat. So you can see, kind of the evolution of this portrait. We started off, she was here, I'm just testing, this is the one light test with no fill. You can see, the shadow's pretty dark. You can see, this is when there's still the cardboard on the table. And so I let her look at the frame. I said, how do you wanna prop this out? And we had already placed all these things back here. We did that beforehand. She said, that's when she told, you know, there's butcher block underneath that cardboard. So that's where that came in. Much more interesting. And then she had this bowl of crayons. We started playing with that, of, you know, should we just put the bowl, should we put the crayons, do we need more artwork. And slowly we got to a point where it's a combination of all those things. So now we're ready to shoot. It's all propped out, now we can just find the moment. That's a great one there. You can see we show the full environment. She's, I like how she's composed nicely, framed up nicely within the artwork. I like that one quite a bit. And these have a little bit of RAW processing done to them. We'll reset it and start from scratch, now that we've made some selects. And I'm just selecting a few. You can see, they're one-starred as we go. I'm only looking at one thing, and it's whether or not it feels authentic and whether or not I like the overall frame. So this one, I cut off just a little too close to the bottom, no stars. This one, I left space, one star. So it's something as simple as that. And I'm just looking for moments in these other ones. Again, I was a little bit crooked. There I'm a lot more straight. Love that one. Let's see if any of these. You know, even getting closer up, it just changed the focal length. We'll select that one. It's a little crooked, but we can make it work. And then we moved, let's see. Like that one. And then she'd start playing with the torch. It's kind of, again, with props, it's funny because I felt like she was presenting this torch to me when she was really checking out the dials and she started laughing because she said, I feel like a torch salesman. So then it got to a point where I just wanted her to hold it and look towards the camera because she wouldn't be paying so much attention to the torch. And then this happened. She turned around completely and I like this moment. And then she started gettin' goofy. So we moved on. What you didn't see were, these were the last shots. She wanted to show me this technique where they, she creates all these little lines within the artwork, using the torch. It doesn't really translate to photo and she didn't know if it would. The video's probably really cool of this. But the photo, you can't tell what's going on. So again, it's mostly just another portrait of her working, which is fine. I do like that one. And you'll be able to see some of the effect, if you just watch the artwork and not the actual photo. But I tried shooting it from the other side. And then all my lighting got screwed up, so it just looks really flat-lit. It's kind of cool, but not what I was going for. And again, this wasn't working to a point that I, I don't mind that photo. Actually, I don't mind that one. To a point where we just moved on. She was finishing up some last things. And these are the shots that came from my card. So when I didn't, when I came untethered, these were those photos. Generally, there's nothing really in there that I love. So now we'll go up, sort by rating. Out of the 441 photos, I upon first glance liked 70 of them. So that's actually quite a bit. So what I would do then is go through and look with a little more refined eye. Like, I don't like that one now that I've seen the other ones. Still don't mind that one, but I know the torch ones are better. So I hadn't seen those ones yet when I saw these. So I'm not marking any of those. Okay, now we're talking. So now I can start doing a little bit of comparison. So we have very similar photos. I like the head angle better here. She's looking off to the side more there. So we're gonna two-star that one, that'll move up to the top. I'm just gonna go through these. I like that one. I like that one, but this one's gonna need some work to bring back a lot of the highlights. Oops. I like that one, as well. I like the head position in all of these, so we're just gonna pick one to edit. And I like that one. It's a nice portrait and it's a totally different focal length than the other ones. That one, as well. Now for these ones, I think we're just gonna stick with one of the portraits with eye contact. I like this, let's see, I like that one. I'm just looking for space around her head. We'll edit one of these, just because. We'll pick the one that's more, has less in the foreground. And now a couple of these portraits. So with these, these are where I'll be really picky because these were kind of the shot for me. Love that one. That one could be fun, it'll be closer up. Like that moment. Love that one. Ooo, I like that one too. We might have to go back and look. And I don't feel like editing any of those right now so we'll let those breathe and sit for another time, probably never get touched. Let's see, so our two-star ones, we went, let me go through those last ones one more time. So we have two moments here, one with her hands together and one apart. I like together, so we'll one-star the one where they're apart. And now, we went from 441 photos to 70 to 14. So that didn't take us that long. These would be the ones I'd work from. And even these, I would cull down even further. Like, these two, I'm gonna go with that one. So I'm gonna get rid of, I'll three-star it. Might as well. And these ones are very similar, as well. So I'm just looking at very tiny details. I like having the color chart on the background here. It add a little nice detail. And it pushes her farther to the right third of the photo. That's gonna be better for composition. I do like that one. I like that one. And I like all these ones. So, that said, we are good.