Hudson Valley Fashion Photographer { Goldyn Fashion Show }


August 16th 2021
Hudson Valley Fashion Photographer { Goldyn Fashion Show }

Fashion Photographer Hudson Valley

You know what I love most about photography?  Fashion photography.  I love the makeup, the style, the creativity in a look.  I love everything about fashion photography.  If it payed my bills I would do it all the time.  Thing is Hudson Valley fashion photography is a little hard to get into.  There really aren’t that many clients, and Hudson Valley isn’t exactly the fashion capital of the world.  So with that in mind it’s hard for me to do it on a regular basis.  But when I get the opportunity to I love doing it.

So my girlfriend is a hair stylist, and makeup artist for Antione Du Chez in cherry creek.  Which gets me an “in” to any of the fashion shows that she does.  She was doing the makeup for the show, and I tagged along camera in hand,

and shot a few of the models.  I wish I had known earlier and then I would have spent a little bit more time preparing for it, setting up lights and stuff.  At least the owner of the salon who was doing the hair was kind enough to give me the go ahead to actually get in there and start telling the models how and where I wanted them to be posing.  After I got the go ahead it was hard for me to stop shooting.  Heck I even shot the runway which I thought I wasn’t going to like doing at all, but in reality it was kinda fun.  There was some big white fabric that I could easily bounce my flash off of so I got some good shots on the runway.  It also helped that I had a friend of mine there to joke around with while I was shooting the runway.

When I first got there I tried shooting at a really high ISO, moderate shutter speed, and wide open.  I just didn’t have enough light where the models were getting ready to pull off anything worth while so after about 10 shots with natural light I popped my flash on and went to town.  I was bouncing my flash off of anything I could find.  The problem was that I was bouncing it off of a lot of really orange things, wood ceilings basically, and so a lot of the shots came out with an orange cast.  As we all know this is less than desirable, and frankly I don’t really like any of those shots, so I won’t be posting them on my blog, but next time, I’m going to get a sheet of paper, and use a custom white balance to get much better looking shots.

This shot is the analog to those orange cast shots.  I grabbed some of the models to shoot them over where I knew I could bounce my flash and get white light like I wanted.  In the case there was a small piece of white ceiling that I was able to bounce my flash on.  That way the model came out with no color cast and the background because it was all natural incandescent lighting came out with an almost pleasing orange hue.  I wanted a colder feeling for this shot, so I changed the hue in photoshop to this cool blue color.  It almost looks like I gelled the background, but really this is a one light setup where my flash is on my camera.

Photo Stats: 1/100, f/3.2, ISO 640

With those kind of stats you can see how I was able to get the ambient light in the shot, along with the properly exposed model.  I’m sure I had my flash set to about 1/2, or 1/4 and was bouncing it off a ceiling that was about 4 feet from the top of my flash, slightly pointed at the model.

Post work was fairly simple on this shot:

  • Cleaned up skin, including a bit of smoothing from blur, and spot healing tool.
  • Removed fly aways from the hair by creating a really blurred layer, and then masking out everything but the fly aways.  I’m talking like 40-50px worth of blur.  Which was easy to do because the background is so out of focus.
  • Playing with levels and curves to get the right amount of contrast on the model and a little bit of saturation tweaking.
  • Masked out the entire model for a hue and saturation layer where I could change the background color.
  • A little bit of cloning here and there.  Nothing major, but it’s all about the details with a fashion shot.  Every Single piece of skin, hair, everything should look perfect and pristine.

Anyways I hope you like it.

-Dave