San Diego Children's and Newborn Baby Photographer | Little Sprout Photography

We’ve recently been experimenting with balancing ambient light and flash. Thanks to the wealth of information on Strobist and some of the examples in Joe McNally‘s books, we’re finding it pretty straightforward to add a little pop to an image or use light for creative effect. We wanted to share a couple sample images and explain the process we went through to arrive at the final result.

In this first photo, the sun was behind and to the left of the kids. It was pretty early in the morning, so the sun was pretty low in the sky and giving the left sides of their heads a nice golden highlight. Unfortunately, their eyes and the shadows on their faces were a bit too dark. Because the basic exposure was pretty good, I kept it as metered and added just a flick of flash (dialed down a stop or so) to fill in some of the shadows and provide a a slight catch light to their eyes. The flash was also aimed above their heads to feather the light a little bit. The result is an image that looks naturally lit; the flash is nearly invisible.

NikonD700/24-70mm 2.8 @ 50mm | 1/500s | f5.6 | ISO500

In this next image, we were feeling a bit more adventurous and wanted to try some of the examples from The Hot Shoe Diaries. Though the sky looks like dusk, the image was actually taken around 2:30pm. First, we set the camera’s white balance to tungsten, which shifted everything to blue, and also underexposed the image by -1 stop to get the sky even darker. The main light is an off-camera speedlight (triggered via Nikon CLS) shooting through a white umbrella just out of frame on the right side. To compensate for the darker image, we added +2 stop to the flash output setting.

At this point, the entire image is still blue since the flash is daylight-balanced. To get Ainsley back to the right color, we added a CTO gel (orange color) to the front of the flash. She comes out properly lit, but everything else stays blue.

NikonD700/24-70mm 2.8 @ 38mm | 1/250s | f10 | ISO200

Here’s a neat Photoshop trick I picked up from watching a Marcus Bell tutorial at Adobe TV. By combining a hefty gaussian blur with Photoshop’s blending modes, you can give your images a nice dreamy feel, which worked out really nicely for a few images we took at our friends’ Johnny and Megan’s wedding. Here’s how:

1. Open your image and duplicate the layer (Go to Layer > Duplicate Layer).
2. With your top layer selected, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. In the example below, I used a radius of 6px because I’m not working with a full resolution file. Select a value high enough to blur out most details in the image.
3. Now, select Edit > Fade Gaussian Blur.
4. In the little popup window, adjust the blending mode to Soft Light. From here you can adjust the strength of the effect by moving the opacity slider down. The example below has an opacity of 50%.

That’s it! It’s a pretty easy way to apply a slightly hazy effect to any image.

NikonD700/50mm 1.4 | 1/80s | f4 | ISO3200

What do you think? If you’ve used this technique, let us know how it worked out for you by posting a comment below.

Pick/Reject
Many times, I’ll end a shoot with dozens (hundreds?) of pictures, which can feel a little overwhelming. After playing with using a star rating system or color-coding my photos, I’ve found the fastest way to sift through the images and quickly sort the keepers from the losers is by using the status flags. Here’s how:

1. Import your images and make sure you’re viewing unflagged images only. This ensures your picks and rejected photos will be automatically removed from the filmstrip upon selection. I find this helps me keep track of images I’ve already addressed.
2. For each image, click P to keep it or X to reject it. I am fairly ruthless at this stage — if an image is out of focus or I don’t like to composition, I will go ahead and reject it. If several images look good, I will use the Compare and Survey views to make sure I’m picking the best image of the bunch.
3. Now switch the flag so you’re viewing rejected photos and delete all of these. No use in wasting space on lackluster images. Once finished, I turn off the status flags so only my picks remain.

I find this simple keep/reject system enables me to quickly sift through large numbers of photos without getting stuck on arbitrary star ratings.

Quick Black & White Check
This one is really easy. From the library or develop modules, select an image and hit the V key. The image will be converted to grayscale. Hit V again to switch back. This is a super easy way to quickly gauge how an image will look in black and white before performing a more thorough conversion.