Shooting Leather

Nice little job in the studio this afternoon, shooting half a dozen leather jackets for the Blue Moon Leathers website.

I’ve worked with Holly and Christian on a fashion shoot before.  Both amateur models, they are incredably easy to work with – better than many professional models!  Maybe it helps too, the fact that our main work is shooting portraits, so Jayne and I are quite used to working with non professionals.

Black leather – in fact any dark material – can be really difficult to light.  Leather, of course,  has to look like.. well, leather.

After carefully balancing the Exposure and shadow sliders in Lightroom, you can bring just the right amount of detail into the darker folds of the garment using the “Fill” slider.

Adobe Lightroom makes post-production an absolute breeze.  We rarely, if ever, go into Photoshop whilst preparing proofs for the client to view.  And when we do open the files in Photoshop to carry out a retouch or background change, we do so with all the Lightroom adjustments already in place.

I shudder when I think of how things used to be just a few short years ago, when we would have struggled for hours in the wet darkroom to  process a job like this.

These shots are from the initial set of 65 previews emailed to the client tonight.  Once I have his “picks” I will be completing the post-production with a background change and retouch.

I’ll post the results of the “finals” in a few days.