This week’s before/after example actually has nothing to do with post processing, but rather has everything to do with creating the photograph you want in the camera.

As the sun dropped below the thick grey cloud layer, it lit up the buildings in the background, but the area where Kristina and Chris were standing was still deeply in shadows.  The sun was just too low on the horizon and the other buildings to the west were blocking it from actually hitting their faces.  So I made the “before” picture, only worrying about getting the exposure correct for the clouds and the buildings.  I wanted to get the clouds as dark as possible, whilc not completely clamping down the exposure on the trees at the bottom of the frame. You can see the result in the “before” version is a properly exposed background but a severely underexposed foreground.

I supposed I could’ve made two exposures and combined them later on in Photoshop .  Or, I could’ve used a bunch of layer masks to try to brighten up Kristine & Chris a bit, but in this case the effective method was simply to create the light that I wanted and make the correct exposure in the camera.

The lighting technique is very simple.  A single Canon 580Ex flash, on a light stand just outside of the left side of the frame, up high and angled down at the couple.  The flash head was zoomed out to about 80mm to focus the beam down a bit.  Triggering was via a RadioPopper Px system transmitter and receiver.  The flash exposure was all taken care of by the camera.  Normally I’d prefer to manually dial in the flash output based on the aperture setting for the background exposure (f.5.6 in this case), but I wasn’t sure how long the light on the buildings would last, and wanted to work fast before it went away.

The final trick was to match the color temperature of the light from the flash with the sunlight hitting the building.  An amber gel over the flash head balanced out the color temperature of the flash with the deep golden sunlight on the background.