Beltcraft studios set 2

Today set 2 from the Beltcraft studios workshops in London.
Model / styling : Nadine.

For the second setup I setup a complete scene.
Starting out with one strobe, adding one to the background and eventually even adding some constant lights that were still in the studio.

In this stage you see an Elinchrom Quadra with maxi light on Nadine, two constant lights in the back and to mimic the edge light coming from the constant lights I used an Elinchrom Ranger RX speed with a reflector and grid aimed at Nadine (the constant lights themselves didn’t register on the dress). The background I also wanted to light but I was out of strobes….. (well never thought I was needing four and we had to travel light) so I used a constant light for the background also (a strip) placed very close to the background and that just gave enough light to make the background stand out a bit more around the letters.

As you can see in the shot above I also added a little rocking horse to add a bit more to the scene….. it looks nice here, but actually the rocking horse was placed there for the next shots.

Here I removed the grid from the backlight and let it shine a bit in the lens creating some lens flare and by removing the grid it also created a flood of light on the floor which I really like IF the horse was in the picture, as soon as we removed the horse it was “missing something”.

And finally I switched from a standard lens to a more wide angle lens to create something more “surreal”.

All retouching was done in DxO optics 9, tinting by DxO filmpack and the extra pop was done with Topaz Clarity.
I recently switched for all my RAW processing to Optics 9 from DxO after using version 8 sometimes (and filmpack A LOT), with optics 9 the addition of the browser gave me the push to do all my RAW processing now in Optics, the quality is just stunning, it squeezes a lot more information out of the files than Lightroom can do.
Topaz clarity is awesome for that little bit of a pop and to be honest I think it’s a plugin that everyone should have, surf to http://www.topazlabs.com/716.html and also support our blog. Use Doorhof99 as coupon code for a really cool 15% discount.