Justin Price Teaching His Skills

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Photo by Justin Price

We’ve caught up with Justin Price from South Florida to have him teach us a thing or two about model photography. Justin started shooting in college at Towson State, when his girlfriend at the time decided to get into modeling. Thinking it would be a good idea to start shooting her himself, he used a Canon rebel at the time to start getting together a portfolio for her. Today you can find his work all over the web, along with the being featured in various magazines both in and outside of the US.

We’ve had Justin give us a few advices from one of his previous photo shots with Elaine Alden from Florida, earlier this year. If you haven’t seen Justin Price’s work before, we suggest you take a look at his website or ModelMayhem profile. Below is a video from a shoot with Justin Price:

On Location

This photo was taken towards sunset when the light was golden and gave a gorgeous even light on the left side of the model, specifically on her hair. The sky was also lit up nice and evenly and not to washed out like it would have been earlier in the day. I even caught the reflection of the sun in the metal on the models shoe.

I used a Canon 5d mark 2 to shoot the photo. My ISO was at 100, shutter speed 200 and my aperture was at 9.0. My camera was set on the flash balance because it gives it more of a warmer hue which if I don’t like I can kill the hue in photoshop with auto color/levels.

How I arrived at these setting was by taking a photo of just the sky to make sure it was properly exposed. I played around with the aperture until the sky looked like I wanted it to. I then had the model lay on the tracks and lit her with two qflashes. The main qflash light had a 12×12 softbox over it to help diffuse the light over the models face and body. It was about 3 feet above her face on manual at half power. The second light was used to light up her legs and lower body which helped create separation between her and the sky. Also the main light was directed at her face and would not have been strong enough to light her whole body.

Finally I relied on the sun to light up the models left side and act as a hair light as well. I then tried different poses with the model, her hand in her hair, above her head, but i picked this one with the hand on her sunglasses because I though it gave her look more attitude. I took a few test shots to make sure everything was exposed properly and that there were minimal shadows on her body. This is the image I came out with:

Fig 1: Result from location

Here are some of the other photos from the same shoot:

Fig 2

Fig 3

Workflow Using Adobe Photoshop

In post in photoshop I first ran auto levels to kill the yellow hue over the photo, as illustrated by figure 4 below.

Fig 4: Auto Levels

The next thing I did was choose selective color, cyan, and put cyan up to 100%, magenta up to 100% and yellow to -100%. Check out Figure 5 below.

Fig 5: Selective Color

This helps make the sky more blue and to give the sky even more color as well as the models skin tone I increased the saturation to +14. Figure 6 below for the saturation.

Fig 6: Hue/Saturation

When the color in the photo was exactly as I wanted it i then took the healing brush, zoomed in on the models face and starting touching that up to make it look flawless.

Fig 7: Healing Brush

I start at a clean area on her head and work out around that in circles making a bigger cleaner area. I then did her cheeks and chin. I then went over her entire body removing any imperfections or flaws. After I smoother out her whole body the image is finished.