Following on the Indo shoot in advance of the recent Vintage Fair in Dun Laoghaire, I shot the Fair itself a few weeks back and all the shots are here. It’s a bit hectic with so many people around but my favourite part is work with individual or small groups trying to get a few shots of them that captures their style for the day – these are in the Shoots gallery.

Black Swan My favourite shot from this series was of Lute in her dramatic black dress  – a no-brainer for the grand staircase shot! As it was the end of the day, the batteries for my lights were fading and I learned that that, unlike tripods, light stands don’t work on uneven surfaces such as stairs – I’ve since got a Manfrotto  Swivel Umbrella Adapter to connect a speedlite to my tripod to deal with this issue in future.

Anyway, I shot this for 1/125^th of a second at f4 and ISO 400 – the latter two high settings were to compensate for the fading power of the flash. It was mounted on my Demb Flash Bracket and diffused with my Lumiquest Quikbounce. Despite Lute's excellent pose, the lighting out of camera  was a bit underwhelming! – as you can see below. Black Swan Unprocessed

 So I did a lot of work on it in Lightroom starting with a Black & White conversion followed by a a lot of work on the tones to increase contrast in the basic panel. To do further work on the dress and background without overdoing Lute’s face, I used Lightroom 5’s new radial filter – check it out on Julieanne Kost’s video and get some ideas on using it from Digital Photography School here and here. Essentially the radial filter works by applying a feathered mask, such as over Lute’s head and shoulders where the later edits did not apply. Of course, Lightroom also allows the mask to be inverted so that edits could just applied inside the boundary area.