Grunt Event May 2010 - Studio Photo Shoot

Grunt Event May 2010, originally uploaded by Mervin Chiang.

I jumped at the idea of Kat's suggestion to do a photo shoot of my dad for the Grunt event at church. Dan needed to show a stressed out man. :) So I just let my created juices flow again after 4 years of not doing these things. Here's what I did...

1. I setup my old stand with my EX 430II Flashgun on diffuser -1 stop set to wireless trigger and positioned it at dad's face level on the left of the frame
2. Set manual exposure to f4.0 1/60 ISO800 with built-in flash at -1 stop
3. Mounted camera on my main camera stand set to low angle
4. Took 22 shots of my dad with some free hand held ones
5. Used Lightroom to adjust exposure up by +0.6, increased dark and contrast. Vignette to -20 and cropped it to get a 4:3 ratio instead for the PPT, and Flyer formats to be better.
6. Used Picasa's soft focus effect on my dad's face, hands and body
7. Used photoshop to duplicate layer, made right background blur (didn't have a better studio setup, background was ugly shelves, but worked out well as the blurred background gave some texture for the words later)
8. Made photo black and white and adjusted the color concentration levels
9. Did the layout of the text to finish.

I felt quite good in a way because it was almost nostalgic to design again! Danger is that it is addictive!