LIGHTING UP A DARK ALLEY - Moscow, Russia Lighting info: the key light is a small strobe in a snoot with a couple full cuts of CTO gel off-camera right on a light stand. I had another speedlite on-camera with a big bounce (and, I think, a CTB gel) to provide some fill. The columns in the back are lit pretty much entirely with ambient. I wish I had used another strobe to give just a touch of rim light on the guys in the background. I wouldn't want these shady characters to be entirely clear, but here I feel they are a bit too ambiguous. As it is, I'm not even sure they're noticeable to most people. Oh well.
SAMIR - Moscow, Russia I was lying down in the snow for much of this set to get the angle that I wanted, but at least I had a coat on: it took Samir a while to thaw out once we got back inside. I switched the camera's white balance to tungsten to accentuate the twilight sky, which was already blue, and lit Samir with one bare speedlite on a stand camera left, double gelled with CTO filters to simulate the warm glow of a streetlamp. I tried using an umbrella at first but a gust of Moscow's winter wind quickly blew my flash over into the snow, even with my camera bag weighing down the lightstand. This shot isn't as "edited" as it looks. The colors are pretty much identical to the original, aside from a touch of desaturation to minimize clipping. Although I did spent quite a lot of time in photoshop working on this photo, trying all sorts of different approaches, many of which were quite dramatic, this was one of those times when almost nothing I did seemed to significantly improve the shot, and frequently made it worse. I ended up fading the opacity of nearly every layer down so low that it was barely noticeable. The finished result has a little bit more sharpness, a little less noise, a little more mid-tone contrast, and lighter shadows. Overall it's an improvement, but really not much different from the original. Hopefully that's good enough.
