Whetstone Pond Shoot
On September 8th I hosted a meet up of the Dayton-Columbus-Cincinnati
Cosplay Photoshoot group at Whetstone
Pond in Columbus. Whetstone Pond is
located next to the Park of Roses in Columbus.
We had 14 cosplayers and 3
photographers attend, so it was a very busy shoot.
I worked with 11 cosplayers of which 6 were in groups of
two. I shot a total of 227 frames in three hours. Of the 292 frames I
edited 146 images and delivered 83 final images. I shot the whole meet using a
light from a single bare off camera speed light on a light stand. I shot with a
bare speed light to compensate for the sun. I shot using ISO 200. My aperture and shutter speed varied
throughout the shoot, due to the changing lighting conditions due to the drifting
clouds. My aperture ranged between F5
and F14 with the most common being F8.
My shutter speed varied from 1/40s to 1/250s with the most common speed
being 1/250s. Finally, my focal length
varied from 18mm to 100mm, with the most common focal length being 18mm.
This was a very busy shoot because we only had three
photographers for 14 cosplayers. I wanted to ensure as many cosplayers as
possible got to work with a photographer and get photos for showing up. While I shoot relatively fast, I was going
faster then normal and it showed in some of the images when I was conducting my
image cull. However, there were still
some very nice images. My favorite from
the shoot is of ButDragonsTho
Cosplay. While she was easy to
photograph, the tricky part was the post edit, due to the tattoo sleeve she was
wearing for her cosplay. There were two
issue I had to contend with 1) the seam of the tattoo sleeve and 2) the color
of the tattoo sleeve, which was a shade darker than her natural skin tone. I’m going to discuss how I changed the original
image on the top into the final image on the bottom.
To get the final image on the bottom, I first did basic adjustments in Lightroom.
These adjustments consisted of color balancing, increasing the contract,
adjusting the exposure, and removing any noise from the image. From there I exported the image into Photoshop
to do the heavy lifting. The first thing
I did was use the content aware tool to remove the seam of the tattoo sleeve
and touched up a few fly-away hairs. I
then applied frequency separation to the image and applied localized gaussian
blur, to smooth the skin. This was very
important in the area of the tattoo sleeve to ensure a decent blend between it and
the model’s natural skin. From there I added
some highlighting using dodge tool. I
then flattened the image and sent it back to Lightroom. I did a few more minor adjustments and added a
slight vignette to the image to finish it off.
While this process seems simple, it took me about 20-minutes to complete.
 |
| Original Image shot at ISO 200, Aperture F8, Shutter 1/100s, Focal Length 40mm |
 |
| Final Image |
Overall, it was a great shoot. You can see all the images from that day’s event
here: Whetstone
Pond
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