The Fun Of Photoshop

This was a fun project to do. I met a local muay thai fighter who fit the role. For this photo, I took the picture of the fighter first. I used a slight variation of the Joel Grimes three light setup. I used three Alien Bees strobes modified with umbrellas and a beauty dish. The beauty dish was used as fill light.

 

For the Background I found an abandoned concrete building on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in SLC. It is called the “Old Salt Air Powerhouse.”  It is an amazing confluence of architecture, gritty and neglected domain as well as vibrant color. Note that this picture is a processed HDR. For those of you who are new to this term it stands for High Dynamic Range. Its purpose is to allow the photographer to expose for light and dark areas without the aid of strobes (artificial light). For example, if you took just one exposure the camera would either read the light levels of the light parts of your image or the dark parts,  NOT both. Below you will see the differences of one exposure versus this HDR.

Below is a one shot exposure. Notice how dark the inside looks. The camera did that automatically and I could do nothing to stop it! Thankfully there is HDR.

By using HDR I was able to not only lighten the inside of the building but also expose for the outside. Youtube  HDR and you will find everything (and more) you ever wanted to know about HDR

Below is the final image. A small amount of dodging and burning along with the basic photo filters that comes with photoshop CS5 and you have a surreal looking pic.