Meet the Palmer's

On the day I was going to leave S. Florida, a friend of mine, Matt, had his family come down from West Virginia and San Diego; they wanted to take some photo's. We were suppose to meet the night before, but there were schedule conflicts and not everyone could take part in the photo session. On the next day, I drove down from West Palm Beach to Ft. Lauderdale to meet them at Lauderdale by the Sea. On the way down, there was a heavy downpour. I didn't think we were going to be able to shoot, but right when I parked, the rain stopped.

Once everyone got there, we headed down to the beach. Since it had been raining, no one was there which made it terrific! Plus, the overcast day, gave off nice even light. In total, we shot maybe an hour and half. The Palmer family was great! They even treated me to my favorite salmon at Aruba's. If you are ever in Ft. Lauderdale, you have to go to Aruba and order the salmon. I think it's the best!

When I left to go to the airport, the rain started again. I guess we had some good timing!

After the shoot was over and I was back in New York, the post worked started which took me about 8 hours to edit 20 photo's. That's like 25 minutes per photo. In reality, that's really not too bad considering a single photo can take as long as 40 hours or longer. I will share with you what I did. First, I created two photo's from my RAW file. One of the photo's was exposed for the sky, the other photo exposed for the Palmer's. I then masked the two images together to get a photo that isn't too under exposed or over exposed. I then created a couple layers of curves, one for contrast, and one for color. I played with the selective color tool. I tried to remove any shadow's from their faces, so under the red color I removed a good portion of the black tones. I also continued to tweak the other colors as well to find the result I thought looked best. I then saved my psd in case I wanted to re-edit it, flatten the layers, and did some sharpening with the high pass filter.