Guestblog by Aryan Agajani

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Today it’s time for the last guestblogger, we will be back on the 8th so I will take over from there on.
From my side I would love to thank all the guestbloggers that kept the blog alive while we were abroad.

Today you can enjoy the work of Aryan Agajani, and I think this is some great work.

About me:
I started photography with a Fuji Film camera that my father bought me when I was 17. However, I decided to take it much further in 2006 by upgrading to my first DSLR camera, Canon 350D. Since then, I mainly shoot on-location as I love to play with ambient light and mix it with flash. Here, I would need to thank all those people who helped me in many different ways since I picked up a camera including Frank Doorhof who is one of the nicest guy I have ever known in this very completive field called, photography.

About the shoot:
The aim for the shoot was to effectively use just one light source to create some dramatic and deep kind of beauty and fashion photographs. For this reason, I only used an Elinchrom 21cm standard reflector with a mounted 20 degree grid on Elinchrom Quadra RX. As I am currently shooting on Canon 5D MK II, I used the Manual setting to set the shutter speed of 1/125th. Then, I grabbed my Sekonic L-758DR to meter the output power of the flash according to the set shutter speed and ISO 100. I wanted to use an aperture around f/7.1 however, I decided to go with f/6.3 to get a softer body skin while focusing on the face area.

 

Post Production:
I always shoot in RAW. For this shoot, again I chose RAW format however, I used the in camera Monochrome option of Canon 5D MK II. After the photo shoot, I transferred the files to Canon Digital Photo Professional, corrected the White Balance with the help of DataColor Spydercube. Then, exported the JPEGs into PhotoShop CS5. In PS, I just tried to work a little bit on the model face to make it more softer. I doubled the background layer, and used the dodge, burn and patch tool to fix those areas around the eyes, lips and chins. After that, I merged the layers and again doubled the background layer to do the sharpening only on the eyes and lips. I used Unsharp Mask with these settings; Amount: 70%; radius: 0.5; Threshold: 0. Then, using white brush, I only sharpened the eyes and lips.

 

Website: www.aryanaqajani.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/aryan.aqajani.photography