Best Features of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

So we were on a shoot Saturday morning, and Debra got a text from Kerry, and she told him about the shoot we were on and that I was setting up the Blackbelt Lighting BB560 speedlights. Kerry suggested a guest blogpost on Dojo, so here I am. Let me tell you a little about the shoot. Debra and I met Brian (in the photos) on New Years Day. We got to talking and traded info, and decided to set up a shoot for the 28th. I had much anticipation for this shoot. Now I am a big fan of diffused sun, so I was keeping my fingers crossed that the 28th would be a miserably overcast and cloudy day. But it wasn’t. The skies were perfectly clear and the 7:30 AM sun was brutally bright and shiny. Oh yeah, and we were having high wind warnings.

We set up the first lightstand with an umbrella, and the wind almost blew my gear and girl away. Debra asked, “Bare flash?”. I replied, “Yes, I think that would be best.” So we set up 3 light stands, each with a bare BB560 flash and Blackbelt receiver. We moved the lights around as needed, sometimes lighting Brian in the car with 1 or 2 lights (plus the sun of course). In a few images we had 1 or 2 lights on Brian, while at the same time having 1 or 2 lights on the car, just to open up the details that would otherwise be black shadows from the low sun.

I shot these images on a Canon 5dmk2, mostly with a 70-200 lens, and a few wide angle shots were done with a 17-40 lens. Lighting conditions being constant, the shots were taken at ISO 50 or 100, from f5.6 to f8, at a 1/200 shutter speed (the maximum sync speed for the BB560). Flash output was set to 1/2 power and sometimes bumped up to full power as needed. I have been using the BB560′s for sometime now and this was one of those shoots where the reliability and power output was really put to the test. They worked flawlessly.

Photos were edited in Adobe Lightroom 4, the black and white images were done with Nik Silver Eex Pro 2, and Nik Color Efex Pro 3 Tonal Contrast preset was used on some of the color images.

If you would like to see more of this collection shot with Blackbelt Lighting Products, you can visit my blog post here.

Thank you Kerry for letting me share this collection with your Dojo friends.