I posted a photo yesterday on my tumblr photo blog of my Mom sitting inside the flower cooler of her florist shop, MacKenzies. I came up with the idea for this photo because I wanted her to have some more photographs of her and her store, I wanted the practice, and I like the idea of this photo. I think she is incredible at what she does, and want people to know it, a lot already do.
Here, I want to go into what went into the photo a little more, not because I think it’s the best photo in the world or anything, because it’s not, but thought you might be interested in my process, good and bad. Originally, I thought she could lean against the outside the cooler door, but that seemed too ordinary. Then I thought maybe I could work some symmetry with the cooler doors and frame and center her with one behind her and to the sides, but the space wouldn’t allow it. I’d have to shoot at like 15mm because there’s a wall to the left of the cooler.
So I thought it would be lighthearted to just plop down inside the cooler! Who doesn’t enjoy opening the door to a flower cooler? You get a rush of cool fresh aromatic air that fills your nose and lungs. It’s a great experience and thinking of sitting in one, that would just be cool.
I moved a lot of the flowers around so I would make sure there would be a lot of color in the frame, I also put the black buckets of flowers next to her instead of the white ones, so that her face would be one of the brighter elements in the photo. I had to take a lot of test shots to figure out that I needed a snoot to control the light, which I didn’t have. So I went to the trash and taped up a tube of cardboard. Cha ching! I needed it because I really wanted my moms face to pop out of the picture and stand out from the other lighting in the cooler.
But then I realized the color of my flash, which, is now, like a spotlight, was way off the greener color of the lights in the cooler.
Canon 580 EX2 flash, on a gorillapod stand, with my cardboard snoot and plastic bag gel clipped on the front, which I shoved to the inside and back of the snoot. This flash was placed up high and camera left.
Okay, problem number two, I need a gel for the flash to better balance the color of the flash with the cooler lights, but don’t have any gels. Okay . . . so I found a yellow plastic bag in the store and cut out a square, Cha ching. I put it on the front of the snoot, take a test shot, oops, now the snoot isn’t working to make a spotlight because the DIY gel on the front is just acting as a diffuser now and shooting light all over the place. Oops. So I shove the yellow plastic bag piece to the back of inside of the snoot. Okay, that worked and back on track.
Now I have to get my reticent mom to hop in her cooler. She says with a smile, “people are going to think I’ve gone crazy with me sitting in my cooler!” So it took some coaxing to get her to relax. Luckily she did, and the shot I chose to work on and that you see was at a point that I wasn’t asking her to pose or do anything. I thought it looked more natural than the ones where I was asking her to smell the flower or whatever.
Here’s the RAW image (on the left) – notice how green everything is, like even her hand, compared to her face. I had to correct that with a curves layer in Photoshop, dropping the red channel down, and masking that adjustment in where I wanted it. You can see the difference between the original and the post-processed photo:
Untouched photo
The touched up photo
The majority of my photoshop work on this image had to do with changing the colors and brightness values to make sure the focus stayed on the subject, my mom in the cooler.
It was a good experience and practice for me. Thanks to my mom for letting me use her as a guinea pig for some of my photography ideas. I’ve got more in the pipeline, just for my own personal projects, so stay tuned for those. Cheers, Lucas.
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