Family portrait session

Past Saturday I got an opportunity to photograph a lovely family.

Kids are always interesting and it's not always easy keeping an eye on everything but I must say these children were very nice :-)

Here is a little sneak peak of the photos from the garden of the Carlyle house in old town Alexandria.

Twilight polo

This 4th of July we found a new and very interesting horse event. Ok I know many people may not be into horse events but with this one it's a little different.
It's about having a good time and enjoy it with family and friends.

At the same time there is a good action packed polo match where a lot can happen.
I didn't know much about polo before the 4th of July but the twilight polo matches held at Great Meadow is pretty cool and a great time spend on a Saturday night.

Below is a few photos from the 4th of July polo match
-- See more photos in the store front (no purchase necessary) --

Budweiser-Upperville Jumper Classic

From the recent Budweiser-Upperville Jumper classic here are a good handful of the Jumpers.

I didn't get the preferred photographer position (in the middle of the ring) so I had to do a little running from one end of the course to the other to get a few different angles.

You can view, send e-cards and purchase prints from here: http://udsigt.photoreflect.com

Sunday afternoon portrait shoot

This past Sunday Lily stopped by to get a few headshots to use in her portfolio while pursuing her acting career.

I used a pretty simple setup. On camera right (about 45 degree angle) I had my alien bee B800 with a large octabox and on camera left (about 80-90 degree angle high) I had my Nikon SB800 with diffuser and roughly 1 stop brighter than the main light.

Now I got around to finishing up a few of the photos and I guess eventually I will get some of them incorporated in a portrait section on my web site (http://udsigt.webhop.net).




After capture my workflow is to import the photos to lightroom using the camera raw plugin which does a very nice job at ensuring colors and light is right. (read more in this post).

After import I had Lily pick the top 30 photos to continue work on these.
Retouching portraits like this got soo much simpler and faster. I am pretty sure Emma could actually do it... it's that easy.
To process photos I take a few simple steps in lightroom:
1. Adjust overall brightness, color and contrast.
2. "fix" complexion with portrait professional (right click and select edit-in)
3. Crop to print size and if multiple sizes are needed create virtual copies for these.
4. Select all and make virtual copies
5. Select virtual copies and change to black and white with the develop setting.

Now all that is left to do is export and/or create a web gallery (using lightroom of course).

If you noticed it in the steps above you are absolutely right. I did not use photoshop at all in any of these steps...
The key to quick processing is the portrait professional package. You can read more about it here.