day 32 - subtle light

my goal today was to set up a lot of lights at low power and let them wrap gently and do their thing. the idea was to make a really subtle, not overpowering situation, with a lot of skin texture and gradients.

so that's what i did. set up a lot of big light sources, gel a few flashes, set 'em all pretty low, hopefully let them add up to enough light to illuminate me. i shot it, and it came out allright. the real achievement in this picture though is the way i tweaked it.

i had gelled different flashes a couple different colors, and wasn't happy with the color balance at all. so i decided to go black and white. but there wasn't a great amount of contrast in the b/w image. so i started dragging hue saturation sliders up and down.

the cool thing (one of many) about lightroom is that you can adjust all the saturation levels using different sliders. so there's a red slider and an orange, yellow, green, aqua.... you get the picture. and once you've made a b/w conversion, lightroom still knows what's what colorwise. so in this image, my face was a little darker than i'd like. i have a mostly red/pink skin tone in my face, so i grabbed the red slider, pushed it up, and my face and skin got lighter in the black and white image. i decided i wanted more detail on my blue shirt, so i grabbed the blue slider and turned it up. found out only my lips and ear cartilage were on the magenta slider, so i set that where i wanted it to be.

i played with the picture for maybe five minutes, sliders up and down, watching parts of the black and white image change, until i got to this point, where i decided i liked it, and quit. looks good as a black and white, i got to say.

here's the setup shot: