phuson.com – Phu Son Nguyen

After the photo sessions we had with Cicilia, Allison and I set out to do our own photoshoot… or more like me just dragging her to the next “interesting” spot that caught my eye a bit earlier. Here is a picture taken from that “interesting” spot:

This “interesting” spot is located inside of the Yahoo! Center’s building complex nearby. It’s the first staircase down to the parking structures below the building complex. Now that I have revealed this piece of information, some of you reading this might know exactly where this was taken.

The whole photoshoot was taken with just one flash (Canon 580ex mark II triggered by the RF-602 trigger) with CTO gel, off to the right side behind a shoot through umbrella. It was getting dark and cold… and truthfully, I was too lazy to pull out all kinds of lighting gear at that point. It all worked out pretty well, I thought. The one light setup made the picture more interesting and moody in a good way. The CTO (orange or tungsten) warming gel on the flash helped quite a bit too, it always gives more “life” to the subject you are shooting, especially if your subjects are humans .

For post processing, I wanted the pictures to have an urban, slightly grungy, but at the same time, professional and commercial look. For the picture above, I burned and darkened the upper left side corner a bit more than usual to make it look more dramatic and mysterious. It looks as if Allison was stranded in some strange basement area posing for the camera.

I liked how the patterns in the background came out so nicely, and to enhance this even further, I used the plugin Topaz Detail and adjusted the new layer’s opacity to not overdo things. The endless repeating stair steps in the background made an interesting diagonal pattern that draws the viewers’ attention to the subject in the middle. I also like how Allison is contrasting with the background not just in terms of the colors. Near the end of the photoshoot, Allison had a suggestion that we should come back at a later time to redo the shoot at the exact place but this time she would be in a black dress or something else classier. I thought it was a great idea that would make the overall contrast between subject vs background even more interesting…classiness vs. grunginess. Next time it will be then!

Here is an outtake and more candid shot from that session, Allison’s being abandoned :

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 2:39 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.