My “Top 5” Photoshop World Photo (Shown During the Keynote!)

For those of you who haven’t figured it out yet, I’m at Photoshop World in Las Vegas this week learning as much as I possibly can. On Tuesday I was in an all day seminar, put on by Canon and taught by Eddie Tapp and Jack Reznicki, in which we studied lighting and composition theory, actually had a photo shoot with real models, and then came back to the classroom for editing and retouching instruction.

Being completely new to portrait photography, this was a day of firsts for me. I had never worked with remote strobes before (fixed lights that act like flashes which are triggered wirelessly), I had never worked with a professional model, and I had never edited a portrait in photoshop.

Having said all that, I was extremely delighted and honored tonight when I found out from one of my fellow attendees that my image had made it into the Top 5 this morning during the keynote speech to kick off the Photoshop World convention (which I missed from being up too late working on Woopra last night).

After presenting the photos they had the crowd vote by clapping, and I’m told it was actually a pretty close call. I didn’t win, but heck – I’m honored just to have been nominated!

Anyway, here is my top 5 finishing photograph. My models name was Lynn, but unfortunately I don’t know her last name or how to give her credit. Nonetheless she was very pleasant to work with and it was a long hard day for her and the other models because there were about 50 of us photographing them for hours non-stop.

You can select this image to view progressively larger versions.

This image was shot with a Canon 5D Mark II and a Canon 70-200mm IS 2.8 lens. I used a custom white balance thanks to my trusty expodisc, and the model was staring up into a single whitebox with a strobe in it triggered by a pocket wizard. I edited the image fairly aggressively in Photoshop.