Here is a sample photo of a project I had the privileged to create with renowned Tennis Player Damian Hume. Damian just graduate from Boise State University and was busy earning his tennis team high ranks in the wold of NCAA Tennis. The idea behind this photo was to practice some new post processing techniques. The photo of Damian was photographed in studio in front of a green screen. Below is the lighting diagram I used for the shot…

Here is my setup

You will see that I used three strobes. Two were given a Paul C Buff softbox which can be seen here. Next, I used a reflective umbrella seen here. I added to large black panels to block the light from the two softboxes from entering Directly into my camera. I say this because I positioned the softboxes at a 45 degree angle behind my subject pointing at me. This gave a nice rime lighting effect to the model. Next I used an Alien Bees 400 watt strobe with an umbrella to fill in his face.

I stood about 6 feet back from the umbrella  and took the picture. What you see in the finished product is a photoshop composite of a very talented tennis player.

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.