Before we start, I would also like to note that, despite the fact that our final image will be in black and white, it is important to understand how everything works in color during the conversion process. While sometimes a simple contrast slider and curves tool can lead to a good-enough conversion, usually it is better to spend some more time tweaking different color ranges and working with white balance to affect color, and thus the tone of the image in order to achieve the best result.

With that in mind, here is the image I will be working on:

Now, lets get to work!

1) Choosing the Starting Point

Lightroom offers three ways of changing your photographs into black & white. While in essence each way leaves you with a grayscale image, the results usually have subtle or sometimes even very noticeable differences – try going through each of the images by clicking on the first one and then moving to the next two by using arrow keys on your keyboard. Also note the change in histogram at the top right side of the screenshot.

You may find that each of these ways may fit different images better, and so it is usually a good idea to see how they all look before proceeding with more thorough conversion techniques. Sometimes, depending on what kind of look you are after, you may even find this first step to be sufficient already. You may also find you like the final conversion of a particular look most even though you chose the starting point which, at first, may have looked the worst. The best thing I can do is find the starting point that’s easiest to work with. In the end, we will compare all three of them.

Here are the three basic ways you can use as a starting point to convert your image to black & white:

a) Changing the Treatment to “Black & White”: You will find the Treatment options at the top of Basic Panel. Changing it to “Black & White” will convert your picture in one mouse click. Choosing “B&W” in the HSL panel (Hue/Saturation/Luminance) has the exact same effect, too. With this method, you can already see it doesn’t look too bad, but for my taste, the skin tones are too uneven and a little flat. It might work for some other picture better, or if I was trying to achieve a more dreamy look. Still, lets not forget this is just the starting point and things will look completely different once we’ve done some key adjustments. Lets move on and see what other way we can get our basic B&W image.

b) Setting the Saturation slider in the Basic Panel to “-100″: The second easiest way to turn your picture into a basic black & white, this one shows much better skin tones and gives the image a little lightness. You can find the Saturation slider in Develop module, bottom of the Basic Panel. Looks pretty good overall, I think – the low contrast is not always a bad thing and can create an interesting mood, also it’s easy to work on. However, there is one other way to do this, so lets move on.

c) Desaturating all colors separately in the HSL (Hue/Saturation/Luminance) Panel: To do this, you need to choose the Saturation column in your HSL panel ant pull all sliders to the left, the -100 mark. This does take the longest, but you can easily save it as a preset to make it a one-click action. How’s the result? I see it as a nice compromise between lightness and punch with also good skin tones. You may notice, if you take a look at the histogram, that the difference in comparison to the first conversion is very subtle, yet visible. The skin tones are smoother and slightly lighter, almost as light as the second variant, but with more punch. Again, it looks quite good. But we’re not satisfied with “quite good”, are we? Lets move on to tweaking all three of these.

A side note – you can also use standard Lightroom presets as starting points, which you can find on the left-side panel. Still, the goal of this advanced tutorial is to teach you how to create a particular look from scratch, so that when there’s a need for a certain B&W conversion, you would know what to alter for desired effect.

2) The Fun Part

Lightroom was developed with an intended left to right, top to bottom workflow, but of course, frequently going back and forth is necessary in order to achieve what you pre-visualized. What we are aiming for is a sort of a medium-to-low contrast, bright image with smooth, bright skin-tone of our wonderful model. We don’t want our shadows to be very dark, but the blacks shouldn’t be light grey, either. With that in mind, lets move on to the actual adjustments, starting with the Basic Panel.

2.1) Basic Panel adjustments

White Balance: While editing photographs in color, we generally try to set a pretty accurate value on this. This isn’t what I do with black & white, however. While dealing with B&W portraits, I understand that skin mostly contains orange, some red and sometimes a bit of yellow color, the exact proportions vary with light and model (note that, depending on other conditions, such as weather and light and if the subject is warm or cold, there might be a tad of purple and magenta color on the face of your model). With black & white, as we go on further, I will try to make the skin bright and smooth without having to blur it and make it look like plastic. I’ve had quite a bit of practice with this and know that, generally and depending on light, setting the White balance to around 6-7 thousand K degrees works best, so we will set it at 6600 K this time. You can play around with this, make it cooler or warmer and see what you like the most. Remember – it’s all based on choice and taste, and Lightroom has no limit on how many presets you have, so don’t hold off your experiments. While working further on you should sometimes go back to this setting and see if it needs readjusting.

You may find that the image already looks different, but we’re not stopping yet. Lets move on further down – I prefer to leave the Contrast, Black-White and Shadow-Highlight adjustment for much later as I like to alter certain color rather than just the tone at first. We can take a short stop at the Presence section of the Basic Panel and set Clarity to “-10″ – it’s smooth skin we’re after, and so we can be sure we don’t need this setting high.

2.2) Hue/Saturation/Luminance Panel Adjustment

Adjusting the Luminance of particular color ranges: If you chose to desaturate the image by sliding the Saturation slider left in the Basic Panel or desaturating separate colors in the HSL Saturation Panel, you will need to adjust the sliders in the HSL Luminance section. As I mentioned before, skin contains orange, redand some yellow, depending on light and subject. And we want skin light and smooth, which means we now have to move those sliders slightly to the right. As you start to move them you will see the image change right away – skin will get much lighter, yet the rest of the image won’t change that much (it will a bit due to warm white balance as it makes the colors a little more orange in the image, depending on the setting you chose). You may find that it’s, at first, rather hard to find the right balance between the two main colors – orange and red. Yellow is more forgiving and sometimes bears almost no visible effect on the lightness of the skin tone. I found that a slight “S” curve works nicely in a number of situations, and so it’s what I did now. In this particular case we want to make the skin tones lighter and then darken the rest slightly to create separation.

If you chose to desaturate your image by changing Treatment to “Black & White” in the Basic Panel or highlighting “B&W” in the HSL panel, you will be faced with that panel rather than Luminance adjustment, which you don’t need to touch or you will go back to color image. In the end they do the same alterations. In our case, I set the values just as I set them in the Luminance section of the HSL Panel.

A side note – if you ever find yourself not knowing which particular color combination to adjust to make your main subject darker or brighter, you can always use the automated Lightroom tool, which appears as a dot in the HSL Panels. All you have to do is click on it to turn the tool on and then click-and-drag on the particular color range or area of the image to adjust it’s Luminance, Saturation or Hue. As you drag you will see the color sliders relative to your subject move left or right changing the values. Very easy to use and gives great results.

Now, the photographs have again changed significantly. In some cases they may even look over- or underexposed, but that’s not what matters – it’s how the tones look. Are they smooth? If you find the skin to be blotchy, you may want to readjust the Luminance settings or the White balance at the top of Basic Panel – both ways work, both lead to different results. Do you like the difference in the lightness of the tones when comparing them? In our case, the tones are quite nice in all three variants with the HSL Desaturated and B&W Treatment conversions looking best, if slightly overexposed and bright, but that we can fix by going back to the Basic Panel and adjusting the remaining settings. Before we do that, have a look at where we stand:

Look good, don’t they? The first example is a little too bright, but I like the tones overall, the skin is very smooth. I also like the subtle contrast. The second one is slightly less bright, but still smooth with a lower contrast, which also looks good, yet different. The third variant is the punchiest, but retains smooth skin tonality. The slightly higher contrast makes it look rather nice, too, and the overall choice, again, depends on taste. We are nearly done and in some cases, this, coupled with some Exposure adjustment, could be enough. I want to, however, work with the tones a little bit more and show you what else can be done. It’s a personal choice when to stop, but knowing how to continue if needed is important because it gives you more options depending on your needs. Shall we go back to the Basic Panel?

2.3) The Basic Panel Again

Previously, we left off with just the White balance and Clarity sliders moved. That hasn’t changed. Why I like Lightroom 4 most is because it has much improved black-white and shadow-highlight tone adjustment, and we are about to use this feature. Up until now everything also applied to Lightroom 3 users. Starting now, Lightroom 3 users will need to adjust accordingly with their Contrast, Fill-light, Blacks and Restore sliders instead of the ones I mention further on.

Adjusting the whites, highlights, blacks and shadows: The extent of these adjustments will vary greatly depending on your photograph and what you want to do with it. We want to improve the tonal transition of light parts of the image to the dark parts of the image. They also look a little flat, and will look even more flat once we’re done with the following changes, but not to worry, we will fix that in the next step.

I’ve set the Highlights slider to -35 to bring back some of the details in parts of the image that may be too bright, so this saves me from having the brightest parts of the image being blown-out to a complete white. The skin is most important here. The change can be very subtle, but subtle and smooth is what we want. Moving on.

I’ve then set the Shadows slider to +54, which lightened the shadow parts of the image, the darker ones more so than the lighter ones. It gave the image even lower contrast, but what I want now is the quality of tones. I can tune them down later.

I’ve then set the Whites slider to +20 and the Blacks slider to +49.

What the screenshot doesn’t show is how I then altered the Exposure. Each conversion variant needed different adjustment in Exposure compensation, and so I set the HSL Desaturated image to -0.6, the Basic Panel Desaturated image to -0.3 and set the “Black & White” Treatment image to -0.8. You might be coming back to this adjustment depending on the photograph, but in our case it looks about right.

While all these steps may have looked like going back and forth between what we’ve already done, they actually allowed us to set the tonality of the image very precisely. I chose to lighten the image with the Shadow-Highlight, Black-White controls, but then tuned the image back down with Exposure compensation. Why did I do that? Why couldn’t have I just used the Exposure in the first place? Well, even though I brought the image back to the overall lightness I wanted (with future Tone Curve adjustments in mind), the Shadow-Highlight and Black-White adjustments still do their job of filling in the dark portions of the image and preserving those tones. Now we have plenty of detail in the shadows and the bright parts of the image, while being bright, are not blown-out, especially the skin tones, which are smooth and light. That is what we wanted in the first place, right? Having space to work with the Tone Curve later on was my intention here, and we now have that space. To give the images just the slightest initial punch, I set the Contrast slider to +5. I rarely use this slider as I prefer the greater control Tone Curve tool gives me, but your approach may vary – in some situations one doesn’t need greater control. So, lets move on to the last important adjustment.

2.4) The Magic of the Tone Curve Panel

Modifying the Tone Curve: I added a very gentle “S” curve in the Tone Curve Panel (Lights +28, Darks -33), and that was enough to do the magic. Suddenly, the image is not flat anymore, but has a very nice shadow-highlight transition to it. While there are brighter portions of the image and darker ones, and the overall contrast is about medium, we still have details where we need them. The hair looks great, with smooth gradation of light-to-dark tones. Exactly what we wanted. Also, look at the skin tone – it’s very smooth, yet has both gentle shadows and highlights to it, it’s bright and very complimenting to our gorgeous model. With that, it also has detail to it, her face isn’t a plastic mask.

3) Finishing Touches

Detail Panel: I set the Sharpening setting to 70 and the radius to 1.8. Setting the radius to a higher value would increase micro-contrast, which in this case I don’t really need – I want the eyelashes and eyes a little sharper, that’s all. For this reason I also set Masking to 70 and left Detail at it’s default setting of 25.

Effects Panel: A little bit of subtle vignetting might suit this photograph. I set the Style to Highlight Priority, changed the Amount to a value of 20 and then, to make it more similar to the natural vignetting produced by the lens, I set the Midpoint to 9 and both Feather and Roudness sliders to +/100. Not wanting to make the vignetting too apparent, I usually try to make it look very mild to subtly aid the viewers eye towards my subject and away from the border of the image.

Last but not least – save the preset!

4) The Result

That’s it! Have a look at the results:

Contrary to how I felt about this conversion at the beginning, I like it the most. Contrast is low-ish, but there’s plenty of tonal range – we have both shadows and highlights. The skin looks the smoothest of the bunch, the image is very light and compliments our model well. For me, this image resembles what I wanted to achieve in the first place the most. Still, it’s a close call and may vary depending on taste – it’s my personal choice at this time.

This one looks nice, as well. It’s even less contrasty, the skin is a little darker and less smooth overall. Even with that I like the dreaminess of the picture. It’s close to how I wanted it, too, and I might choose this another day, depending on my mood.

This one, just as I knew it would when I started the conversion, is the punchiest of the lot, and I’m sure plenty of people will prefer this look to the above two. Even though it has more contrast to it, the skin still has a very nice transition from dark to light, it’s very seamless and smooth, which looks nice. Really, whatever differences these images carry, it’s all about the taste and mood of the person choosing. I like them all.

5) Was It Worth the Effort?

While in some cases working with Tone Curve or Contrast slider might be enough, it often doesn’t look nearly as good. Good, but not as much. Also, having the B&W preset with more settings makes it much more flexible in terms of light. Look at it this way – you have a modular camera system and a point-and-shoot. The modular camera takes more time to set up and is not as easy to use, but if something brakes, you only need to replace that part. The point-and-shoot is very easy to use and simple, it also can give great results. But if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Flexible and easy to adjust is the key here, and once you’ve saved yourself that preset, it also makes things just as quick.

But that’s theory. Lets see if it really makes any difference. Below I have two images compared. The one on the left side (“before”) is one of the results I showed you a little earlier, and it involves the above-mentioned color and Shadow-Highlight, Dark-White adjustments. The one on the right was done by simply tweaking the Tone Curve (which now looks much more complicated, too: Highlights 0, Lights +31, Darks +63, Shadows -27). Both were converted to basic B&W by changing the Treatment at the top of the Basic Panel to “Black & White”. I tried to make the second sample as similar to the first one as I could without using any advanced techniques. Which one has the better skin look? While it also depends on taste, I would say the left sample looks much better and smoother. I didn’t use the Contrast slider for the second sample as it made matters worse. The Detail settings are identical. Take a look:

In my opinion, it’s worth the time spent on learning and making the needed adjustments to achieve the best look possible for that B&W image. I hope this tutorial gave you a better understanding of how to control each step of the conversion. Try to experiment – you may find some very interesting looks to choose from for your portraits.

Depth

Mastering the depth of the story and being able to translate it into a visual prospect is very important, so it certainly helps to have a solid understanding of how depth of field can affect your images and the story you are working on. Whether it is a portrait or a landscape shot, the right amount of bokeh should be able to transport the viewer into your story. You can choose a longer lens with a large aperture (small depth of field) to pinpoint one element in an image that your viewers could concentrate on, or use a small aperture (large depth of field) to portray the melting pot of action, with many elements to the story.

Background

Background of a photograph is a very big information carrier. Choosing an appropriate background will make your post-processing job a whole lot easier. Who wants to sit and spend precious hours editing out unnecessary distractions on the background? Instead, look for a cohesive environment to work with your story. Background can work hand in hand with your lens aperture to save or ruin your image as an information carrier and storyteller. So, being able to utilize your depth of field efficiently with the background is an art in itself. Ask these simple questions: Is the background relevant to the story that I want to portray? Are the any extra elements in the background that I want to change or eliminate? Should I recompose my shot so that nothing looks out of place?

Here are some simple things you can do with the background that will immediately help you get better results when photographing portraits:

1. Find a different background that is less busy, more or less colorful (see below on color), etc
2. Learn to crop in camera to avoid irrelevant content. Move yourself or your subject to a slightly different location or use a different angle.
3. To get the best bokeh, make sure to give plenty of space between your subject and the background. Having a good fast lens like the Nikon 50mm f/1.8G (see our Nikon 50mm f/1.8G Review) or a solid portrait lens like the new Nikon 85mm f/1.8G will certainly help with getting good bokeh.
4. Don’t be afraid to bring your subject close, but watch out for distortion. Wide-angle and short focal length lenses are known to greatly distort images. Unless your intent is to make your subject’s face look out of proportion, use longer lenses for better compression. That’s why telephoto lenses are ideal for portraiture.
5. Pay attention to lines and curves in the background that could enhance the composition and overall feel of the image.
6. If there are any vertical lines in the background, place your subjects in such a way, that the lines are not directly behind the head of your subject. A great image could be ruined by things growing out of a person’s head.

Color

Color and tone are among the main conveyors of mood and character in any photograph – it can be both distracting and amazing. Although tonality could be more of a post-processing topic, color is most definitely not. You should be able to see the color before you take a photograph, regardless if you wish to alter it later or not. Just like the background, color can make your shot look cohesive or all over the place. Positioning your subjects against a background with lots of different blues, reds and greens may not be a good idea. When you want the eyes to rest on one spot, over your subject, choose a background with a less distracting color palette.

Then again, there are always exceptions to these guidelines, so do not be afraid to experiment.

On some occasions, I have been even asked to skip the formals in hopes of avoiding guests from stress and chaos, which sometimes can happen during the formal session. While not everyone might enjoy this experience, it is also understood that taking formal pictures is an essential part of wedding photography. This is how the memories are preserved. This is a precious way for a bride to remember her family for many, many years to come; in her happy state. So, the challenge remains for the photographer to make sure that the time allocated for the formal portraits is spent efficiently and as quickly as possible. In the eyes of the wedding guests, a photographer is a miracle worker, control freak and a very sweet person who can turn a very difficult session into something magical. So, my dear magician friends, let’s get on to it. You are the expert and what do you do next?

There are steps you can take to achieve your goal and have everyone happy on your watch. Your first step would be to make sure that the watch doesn’t go over 30 minutes for any formal session.

1. Talk to the bride and groom before the wedding. Do your research and get to know your subjects earlier. Let’s admit that there is no way for you to get to know so many people at once. So, start early and talk it up with the bride and groom during the consultation session. Find out what their expectations are towards the formal portraits and how many people might participate in those. Sometimes it is easier to get a list of the family members who ought to be photographed alongside the bride and the groom. Ask the bride to inform her relatives that there will be a point during the wedding (if the exact timing is known, that would be more helpful) when they will be asked to get photographed. Keeping everyone informed will help you gather people around efficiently. Always make sure to ask the couple if there is anything you need to know about their families and have a strategy worked out to take care of any potential problems.

Usually, close family make it obvious for you to notice them. Walk around them, be a regular guest and interact with them before the formals, so that you are “familiar” to them. Let the guests talk and meet and have fun while you steal a few of them to get photographed. This way, everyone can be engaged all the time by either you or by other guests. It will only help you get those sincere emotions naturally, with much ease.

Also, keep in mind that you do not have to fit every single guest into a formal session. Friends and distant family members can be photographed all along the wedding reception and cocktail hour.

2. Help your subjects relax. People are often intimidated by photographers and their big cameras. And then there are bags hanging off our shoulders, with some of us using big D3′s and Mark IV’s with those giant 70-200′s. Intimidating at best… I find that being honest with my subjects helps me relax them very easily. Talk to them and communicate that you might be shooting them, but not with a rifle. You’re not dangerous, you don’t bite or bark at people, and the big bazooka-like tool you have in your hands is only intended to make them look fabulous. That’s right – joke! This will also allow the sincerity of your subjects to shine and will allow you connect with them in a different, emotional level.

3. Make a good use of maid of honor… and/or your second shooter. That’s right! Often these beautiful ladies are family or a very close person to the entire wedding party. With her help you can gather people quickly and use her as a reference point if you need names and information of guests. If there is no maid of honor, an aunt will be an excellent “go to” lady. Second shooters or assistants come in very handy during formal sessions, too. If trained properly, they can help you organize the groups to be photographed (look for grandma and grandpa who decided to go for a walk before the reception, locate an uncle at the bar, etc). They can help you set up and hold your lights, reflectors, etc. Your second shooter should not photograph with you during the formals, as it often distracts everyone.

4. Spot a good location with great light. Usually a quick glance at the area of the wedding ceremony and reception should be sufficient for you to score a little nook to use as a suitable background for the formals. Do so as it gets closer to the actual shoot. The morning light will not be the same in the afternoon and the afternoon light will not be the same during and after the sunset.

You should try to locate a nice spot with natural, soft light to illuminate your subjects. If an outside location does not work for some reason, a covered patio/gazebo or a room with big windows can be good potential candidates for the session.

5. Be at the ready to take a photo-journalistic approach. If you are storyteller, you can photograph your subjects without being noticed or without orchestrating every single thing. Be always ready and shoot away when you see a moment. Capture the emotion and love every second of it.

6. Go from large to small. Start out with a large group of people and then narrow the group down as you shoot along, leaving the closest relatives to photograph at the end – they will typically have more patience than others. It is much easier to gather everyone for a group picture at the beginning of the session. You do not want people to wait too long on the side while you are taking pictures of others.

Photographs and text by Romanas Naryškin and Lola Elise.

First of all, let me introduce Suuthe. It is an all organic skin repair cream company which started with Mari searching for ideas to cure her son’s eczema problem. Without being able to find a solution from doctors for her son Peter’s aching problem, she decided to look further and work on something natural and effective. That’s how Suuthe came to live. As a mother of two children who suffered from eczema for a while, I wish I have met Mari earlier! If you know anyone like that, tell them to check out this wonderful product.

Here is how the photo session unfolded. All of the images were taken with the Nikon D700 body and a single Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G lens (my favorite as always).

This is Mari with her son Peter. I positioned them facing towards a large window to take advantage of the beautiful light pouring into the room. I usually shoot between f/1.8 and f/2.8 with the 50mm, so that the background looks nice and creamy.

I didn’t use any flash for these portraits this time, since I had plenty of light available in the room. In the above image the window is to Mari’s left. Hence, you can see a nice catch light in her’s and Peter’s eyes.

The above portraits were shot while taking advantage of Colorado’s winter sunset. I really like the yellow hue on Mari’s face. Both images were shot at f/1.8.

Initially, I was there to take some headshots, but we decided to add some products to make it a little more fun. I didn’t have anything fancy at my disposal, except for a 40 inch umbrella and one Nikon SB-900 speedlight. So, I tried to use the ambient light as much as could. The below image was shot on a black table at f/2.8, ISO 1000.

Love that depth of field! Shot wide open at f/1.4, ISO 400.

I wanted to do something a little different with some of the images and asked Mari if she had a small mirror for me to play around with reflections. For the above shot on the right, I used the 40″ umbrella along with the SB-900 to concentrate the light on the subject and overpower the ambient light a little. The off-camera flash was triggered by a PocketWizard Plus II unit on the D700 (more on them on our upcoming flash photography articles), with the second unit connected to SB-900 via a PC sync cord. Exposure and flash power were both set manually.

Word of advice to beginners – practice on smallest of the ideas and do not be afraid to experiment. You will learn a lot in the process!

I used my trusty Nikon D700, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 for wide-angle shots, Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G for detail shots, two SB-900 Speedlights, three Pocket Wizard transmitters/receivers and just one 30-inch umbrella. Everything was shot in Manual mode to give me consistency and control over flashes and the entire process.

It was an on-location photo shoot and I was informed beforehand that the apartment would have glass and concrete walls all around. The only light available was the 3 chandeliers that you see in the first left image. I also had very little ambient light coming from the far kitchen, to the right of the chairs.

Since there were no moving subjects in the first left image, I could have probably gotten away with having my camera on a tripod and setting a slow shutter speed to shoot in ambient light. Instead, I decided to set up my flashes and take a couple of tests shots of the set before my subjects occupied the photo shoot arena. I really wanted to get some reflections and some direct harsh light from my strobes on the chairs and other objects. So, to give it a more “modern” look, I set up my main light using an SB-900 on a stand with a single umbrella in a shoot-through configuration on the opposite side, about 3 meters away from furthest chair.

With having just one side of the set illuminated, I still needed to introduce one more flash to the right. Since I had some ambient light coming from the right, I didn’t want the flash to come off too strong. I set up another SB-900 on a stand with the diffuser cap to serve me as a fill light (or a rim light, considering I would have a subject sitting on that chair). I increased ISO to 400 to let some of the ambient light to come in to the picture. Both flashes were connected to PocketWizard units, with another one on top of my camera.

For the product shoot of the top right image, I used the same umbrella + SB-900 speedlight set to my right at about 45 degrees, a little higher than the product. Increased the depth of field to f/2.5 to have the business cards in focus and everything else in nice bokeh.

The toughest thing to do during this photo session, was control the light spill that was giving me all kinds of nasty reflections on the glass. I did not have any cardboards or other accessories with me, so I had to arrange the light in a way that minimized the spill. The rest had to be cleaned up in Photoshop…

In the above image, I introduced subjects into the set. If you notice, I removed the strobe from behind Kent (the gentleman who is wearing a white shirt). In order to minimize flash on his white shirt (his entire shirt was getting severely overexposed), I had to move the umbrella to my left, above Hani. You can see some rim light on Hani’s hair. I did not move the light on the right as I still needed it to serve me as fill light on Olga’s body (customer on the right) and on Hani’s face.

The product shots were all done with one main light (umbrella). For the above image, I placed the light slightly to my left, above the objects. You can see how the light drops on the product by properly illuminating it and providing me enough light to be able to capture the reflection, too. For the second image below, I removed the rim light from the right and moved the umbrella from my left to my right. Now, Hani’s back and her hair are not lit. I wanted to focus more on the pedicure process.

For the above image of Hani, I set up two lights. One behind Hani to give her a nice rim light and pop her from the background, and another one slightly to my left. Nasim thinks that there is too much rim light, but I kind of like it :) Again, reflections were impossible to avoid but I had to make best of what I had.

Both images above were shot with a rim light behind Hani and the main light to my left. If you are looking for information on my exposure (shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc), it is available through EXIF on each image.

I hope these examples can give you some idea of how you can use your Nikon strobes creatively and have some good results.

Post-processing was very quick – I simply imported everything into Lightroom, then cropped and aligned images a little. For the black and white image below, I used Lightroom’s built in functionality for converting to B&W. Under the HSL/Color/B&W panel in Develop Module, I used the following values: Red: 0, Orange: +3, Yellow: 0, Green: -20, Aqua: -35, Blue: -30, Purple: +5, Magenta: +5. To give it a slightly “chocolaty” look, I used “Split Toning” with a slight coloring to Shadows and some tweaks to Hue and Saturation. Then, I used “Strong Contrast” under “Tone Curve” to make B+W look punchier, but it was not enough, so I increased the “Blacks” to 25 under “Basic” to bring up more blacks.

The day was sunny and nice, but the sun was still rather harsh, so I moved the kids under the porch to move away from direct sunlight. As usual, I shot in aperture priority mode and used an aperture of f/3.5, since I was standing rather close and I did not want to blur their faces. At the same time, f/3.5 was small enough to bring the bodies into focus and large enough to blur some of that background :)

This time, I decreased the aperture to f/1.8 to have a shallower depth of field, so Maz got out of focus a little…Plus I was more interested in Uma’s facial expression rather than snapping another shot of them together in focus.

For the rest of the images, I used an aperture of f/2.5 (I like to stay between f/1.8 and f/2.8 on the 50mm for good-looking bokeh), which delivers sharp images in the center, yet blurs the background enough to make the portraits look pleasing.

As you can see, all of the images were taken in a shade – I rarely work with sunlight, unless the light is very soft early in the mornings or late afternoons.

That’s how we decided to pica boo with Uma!!!

…and Maz decided to join :) but then he didn’t like this game much! He is a big man now, with a shovel :)

When it comes to photography, some children are very eager to pose in front of a camera and others are somewhat difficult to work with. Trust me, I know how it feels to work for hours and not get one decent picture. I have two sons of my own and up to this day I do not have a single good picture of them – nothing to be proud of, since both Nasim and I are photographers :)  Maz was no exception – boys like mine and Maz would rather go do some interesting stuff than pose in front of a camera. Nothing helps, unless you are equipped with extra toys, balloons and lollipops that I usually carry. My heavens, when I was photographing Uma and Maz, I forgot everything at home! To get these kids to look at me, I had to get creative by blowing a bubble with the gum in my mouth! Yeah, children do not mind if you chew bubble gum in front of them :) Whatever you have to do as a photographer to get their attention…

We had a blast while photographing Sofia. It turns out, she is a very busy bee!  Nevertheless, she posed for me in between collecting sweetness around her  and made me one happy photographer :D

As I went along photographing, I found out that Sofia changes roles from a bee to a little fairy. Isn’t she adorable? :)

Love her! I hope you enjoy the images as much as I did.

We used couple of flashes for some of the images. If anyone is interested in the techniques we used, please let us know, so that we can shed some light on the subject :)

All of the images were shot with the Nikon D700 and Nikon 85mm f/1.4D lens.

This image was shot with natural light, early in the morning in the beginning of the session:

When you are shooting during the day with the sun directly above, spotting nice shady locations and utilizing a reflector to reflect some light into the subject’s face can work wonders. Most of the images below are shot with the Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G that we are giving away tomorrow.

Another image shot with the help of silver reflector:

The above image is my favorite from the entire photo shoot.

Malika, I will miss you dearly and I can’t wait to take your pictures when you come back to Colorado!

Time for the technical stuff. All of the images below were shot in natural light. Luckily, the weather cooperated and we had some nice clouds diffusing the sunlight for me. Where the sun was too bright I looked for shaded areas – mostly under trees and near buildings. Having a fast prime lens also helps a lot when you have to shoot in the shade without artificial light. So, for this shoot, I mostly used the Nikon 50mm f/1.4G mounted on the D700. ISO was pretty much kept at 200. Shutter speed varied according to availability of the light. The EXIF Data is preserved in all images, so feel free to explore the settings and let me know if you have any questions!

Post-processing is minimal, imported with standard settings and made very quick changes in Lightroom for some of the above images.