Industrial Photography: Shooting the Wind Turbines

Last week I had a great assignment at the wind turbine farms in Eastern Oregon. I sure love shooting this type of stuff with the blue collar workers out in the field. We shot a ton of imagery with this guy positioned around the wind turbines and from high angles and low angles, telephoto and wide angle. The image will be used for a trade ad. For lighting I used a Norman 400B on a stand with sandbag and Pocket Wizard.

There is nothing scientific here as far as lighting, rather its the look that I wanted to achieve. I could have used the flash as a flash fill letting the sun be the main light, but I really like the look of underexposing the ambient light and using the flash as the key light. I set the strobe at 1/2 power and chose the fstop that provided a normal flash exposure and then set the shutter speed at a -1 stop below normal exposure. This really makes the guy pop out against the background. Read on for a few more examples.
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Portrait Professional Software: Nice!

I have been shooting quite a few staff photography assignments this year. In fact it seems that is one area that corporate clients are not cutting back. I have always used Photoshop to do my retouching, adding some diffusion and skin softening techniques along with an occasional Eddie Tapp Dream Glow effect to get them all to look smoother and younger-the most common request I get. I have worked some of these steps into some actions to speed up the process but you still have to manually paint on your masks as each head is in a different position. It began to get tedious. I have seen the ads for Portrait Professional and decided to read a few reviews which I found to be all positive so I decided to buy it and give it a try. WOW! What a great program and here are some examples.
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