Guest post: Motorcycle Girl Lighting Setup and Retouch by CJ Foeckler

9/03/2015 ISO 1200 Magazine 0 Comments

Today we have a new guest post by CJ Foeckler (website) , graphic designer by day, photographer by night. He attached his original photos, lighting diagrams for each scenario, and a bts photo that shows his setup from where CJ was shooting from.

RETOUCH A

While digging through my work, I realized that I didn't have anything spectacular in my retouching portfolio that showed a full process of a long, involved retouch. I'm a photographer and always do my own retouching, so I figured that I would give myself some of my own mock projects to show prospective clients the extent of what goes into some of my retouching.

RETOUCH B

Watch the whole process of my retouch of a motorcycle movie poster from start to finish. See all of the working photos straight out of camera, to the completed, fully retouched version. I compressed the just over 2 hours of retouching and creating into just over 7 minutes!

I decided to shoot some photos of my wife and one of my motorcycles as a fake movie poster or a dramatic cinematic styled portrait. I shot variations of her on and off the bike with simple Canon Speedlites. I used a Canon 430ex ii on a light stand with a small 16" beauty dish with a sock as the back right hairlight, and a Canon 430ex ii in a 3' umbrella softbox on a light stand as the key light just to the left of the model. They were triggered with a shoe flash trigger on my Canon 5d Mark ii with 24-70mm f/2.8 lens.

LIGHTING SETUP A+B

The backgrounds were shot by me with available light in a couple different locations in a downtown area to give the images a gritty, urban feel. I then took all of those images into Lightroom to make general levels adjustments. Then ran those through photoshop to do a majority of my retouching.

In Retouch B, I also created some custom hand lettering that I drew by hand, scanned in, and worked through Adobe Illustrator as well as Photoshop before dropping it into the final layout.

A real pleasure to have this guest post today. Thanks CJ Foeckler for your help.

Text, images and video via http://www.cjfoeckler.com