School Photo-shooting - Part 2

… continuation of School Photo-shooting - Part 1

Post Production

Individul portraits

The portraits had all too warm white balance - easy fix for that. The skin was glowing thanks to the golden reflector and the orange blinds.

Eyes were sharp and bright with beautiful catch lights. I usually brightened up the shadows in them a bit to get even more focus to them. It looked great.

I used a brush to lighten up the dark parts of the face a little. And I added slight vignette.

Group shots

I really had fun editing the group photos. For each group, I had the 9 pictures. I layered them up in Photoshop, aligned them and simply went face by face and erased the layers until I found a layer where the person looked great. So after an hour of brushing the layers off, I ended up with a “perfect” picture of the group composed of these 9 pictures. I love such Photoshop magic.

Lessons Learnt

Of course that things were not as smooth as I expected. First, it was lot of kids and many of them were sick on the day of shooting. Therefore, the first morning, I only managed to do about half of the work. Then, unfortunately, I got sick - the worst cold in years. Then, the kids were in covid isolation…. And when I finally finished all of the pictures, we realised that we missed one boy! We thought that he was there for the first shooting, but he was not. So I arrived for the third time to really have everyone. Next time, it’s probably better to pay more attention to have a very clear list of kids and tick them off.

A few pictures turned out to be not so awesome after the first morning. Like weird stuff at background of some “action” shots from the classrooms, strange facial expressions, out of focus eyes and so on. The advantage of the sick breaks was that I had a chance to re-take them during the second morning - to really have awesome photos of everyone (at least we thought so…).

I also learnt to focus on details. For example a white remaining of a snack on a mouth - much easier to clean with a wipe before taking the picture than later in Photoshop!

The strongest experience for me was to learn how the kids were awesome. When I was taking the “action” shots at the classrooms, I was trying to be invisible there, walking around and capturing their learning effort. I always kneeled to take a picture to have a good angle. And very often, a kid noticed me kneeling on the ground - he or she brought a cushion for me to make me more comfortable! I usually used it for a minute and then got too focused on the pictures and forgot about the cushion. And another kid came to me with a another cushion! By the end of the first morning, I was carrying around 8 cushions! Aren’t they wonderful? ❤️