2- @PiedmontPhoto

3- @SexyNinjaMonkey

Congratulations to all of you. DIYPhotography will be sending you your new Bokeh Masters Kit very soon.

Stay tuned for YPS’s 3rd bi-annual Scholarship Award contest coming in April!

You liked this post? Then check out these ones as well!

• Bokeh Masters Kit Giveaway!
• Bokeh Masters Kit Review
• Learning Project from DIY Photography!

You liked this post? Then check out these ones as well!

• Creating Pseudo HDR Images in Lightroom 2
• New Tutorials Coming Soon on YPS!
• Adding a Virtual Frame in Lightroom – Video Tutorial

If you’re too lazy to read my review, I can sum it all up by saying that it’s a unique camera ad-on that’s well worth it for anyone looking to produce original and creative imagery.

I like the Bokeh Masters Kit so much that I asked Udi if I could give a few away here on YPS.  So guess what? Yanik’s Photo School has 3 Bokeh Masters Kit to give away!!

If you win, here’s what you’re going to get:

A masters kit bundle that includes….

• A custom designed, Laser-cut ingenious Bokeh disk holder which allows to easily attach Bokeh disks
• 5 classic disks: stars, hearts, happy and sad smiley and Royal Lily
• 15 more fabulous Laser-cut Bokeh Discs including sports, animals, cool icons and more
• 8 uncut disks that allow you to create your very own Bokeh shapes
• A custom designed colorful disk wallet

1- All you need to do is to follow YPS on Twitter @yanikphoto. If you don’t have a free Twitter account, you’ll be asked to create one.

2- Once you are following YPS, all you need to do is to tweet the following message:

Win a @diyphotography Bokeh Masters Kit with @yanikphoto. Please RT. Info here: http://tinyurl.com/yll8sjj

3- Done!  That easy.

The contest is open until 9:00 AM EST on Monday March 1, 2010. The 3 winners will be announced on Wednesday March 3rd. Please do not spam your followers. If YPS gets spamming complaints, you will be disqualified. Multiple tweets won’t increase your chances of winning.

The winner will be contacted via a DM on Twitter. You will be asked to email your first and last name. This information and your email will be sent to to DIYPhotography.net. Udi will then get in touch with you for shipping details.

You liked this post? Then check out these ones as well!

• Bokeh Masters Kit Contest Winners
• Bokeh Masters Kit Review
• Learning Project from DIY Photography!

The Lighting Setup

I wanted something up to  date for lighting so I kept it fairly simple. I set up two 1 x 4 feet strip lights with grids on either side roughly 30 degrees behind me. The strip lights were roughly 2 feet away from me. I decided to use strip lights instead of just a direct flash because I wanted a bit more diffusion… less harshness.

I stood about 10 feet from the light grey background to get a darker grey by avoiding light spill from the strip lights. I then proceeded to adjust my lights to my camera settings. I wanted a deep DOF so my settings were: f13, 1/200 sec, ISO 200. With that done, I found that firing my flashes at 40% power work perfectly. All I needed now was a fill light to eliminate the strong front shadows in the face and on the clothes.

So I set up a 2×2 softbox on a boom about a foot above my head on camera left to get some nice deep shadows under the chin and in the eyes (for a bit of edge and mystery! hahaha). In some of the final shots, I didn’t want shadows under the eyes so I lowered the fill light a bit. Since it’s a fill light I knew the power had to be less than the strip lights. 10% power about 2 feet away was perfect ! Here’s the lighting diagram.

The Planning

Once the lighting was to my liking, I needed to plan how I would pose. So I took some notes while looking at every piece of clothing I was going to shoot. Of course this just gave me a general idea of some poses to guide me and the rest would be improvised as I felt it. But this planning exercise was very important and should not be overlooked as it helps define your shoot. I then put a marker on the floor to set my focus point and to know where to stand after checking each shot. I would suggest shooting tethered with the laptop or monitor facing you so you don’t have to run behind the camera after each shot.

Shoot wide and crop later. With the size of sensors today, we can easily afford to crop into our photos so shoot as wide as you can. Remember that it’s better to crop than to have that perfect shot with a body part out of the frame. Doh!

The hardest part of the whole shoot was to get into character. Models don’t have it easy, I can tell ya! Respect! Remember that I took 163 shots and only liked 22 so that means that only 13% of the photos were good. My trick to get into character was to put some awesome music and let loose for a few minutes before shooting. Dancing really wound me down.

Here are some of my favorite shots. I kept the same lighting setup of all the shots.

Before you ask me how I post processed the final images, let me tell you! In Lightroom, I only did basic curves adjustments and reduced the red (-20) and orange (-30) saturation. Then in Photoshop, I used Topaz Adjust with the default portrait_drama setting to give it that extra pop. Topaz Labs are awesome! The best plugins I ever bought for Photoshop.

So go ahead and go take a few self portraits for yourself. You’ll have fun and you’ll learn about posing. You’ll be able to appreciate your models a lot more after that I guaranty it!  Share your self portrait links in the comments! We’d love to see them!

You liked this post? Then check out these ones as well!

• Using One Light for Drama – Lighting Tutorial
• Shooting on the Brooklyn Bridge – Lighting Tutorial
• Off Campus Learning Links for June

You’ll see that it’s not at all complicated to create this HDR look in Lightroom. All you need to do is play with a few sliders. It’s all done Basic Panel. This is my workflow but you can do it in any order you want. I start off by bringing some of the shadow details out by using the Fill Light slider. Don’t be afraid to crank this one up.

Then I slightly increase the blacks or more contrast.

After that, if off to the Contrast slider and lowering it slightly.

Time now to boost the Exposure so that the image is properly exposed.

After properly exposing the photo, you might get some blown out highlights so the next step is to use the Recovery slider.

Now that we got most of the basic settings done, it’s just a question of tweaking Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation to your liking. And voilà! you’ve just created your pseudo HDR image directly in Lightroom.

To make things easier for you, I’ve created 2 HDR Lightroom presets to download. CLICK HERE to get them.

HDR1 is for high contrast scenes like a bright sky and a dark foreground. HDR2 is more grunge-like similar to what Topaz Adjust does. Both versions have a vignette option as well. Here are some before and after shots using these presets.

HDR1

HDR1 Vignette

HDR2

HDR2 Vignette

Here’s how you import Lightroom 2 presets. Unzip and place presets in a folder on your computer. In Lightroom, right click on any of your current presets and select Import… Find your folder with the presets and select them then click OK. Done!

You liked this post? Then check out these ones as well!

• How to Create HDR Images in Photoshop – Video Tutorial
• Adding a Virtual Frame in Lightroom – Video Tutorial
• Creating HDR Images Directly in Lightroom – Video Tutorial