Andriy Zolotoiy Photography Blog

“Drinking is the joy of the Russes. We cannot exist without that pleasure”. That was just before Russia accepted Christianity as official religion. Everybody has their own reasons.

My current target clientelle is small to mid size businesses; and that’s where I receive the most photography quote requests. I don’t know where most of these people get their expectations from but fairly common trend is to get beautiful creative high resolution image with full copyright transfer for $10-$15. Common, people, for that price you can get passport photo at Costco. And you won’t get digital negatives.
This expectancy that photographers love their job and willing to work for free driving certain portion of photography market down. Not all of it, high end market is fairly secure for now but it’s interesting to see developments over next few years.

In this tutorial I’ll explain my workflow how to create shimmering skin on example from my recent bikini photoshoot.

Here is the image how it came out of camera. In my workflow I bring raw files into Lightroom first to do picks/rejects selections and adjust exposure and white balance as needed.

If you would carefully reverse engineer this image you might notice 3 light sources. I used standard three point lighting setup as outlined in following diagram:

I tried to work by the numbers before with light meter but it’s not my thing so I adjust levels by the eye.
When I bring image into Photoshop I analyze how much work skin needs. In this case I needed to smooth it out for which I used Nik Efex Dynamic Skin Softener plug-in with detail values not exceeding 5-5-5 to keep texture intact while smoothing overall appearance.

Next step is to add brown gradient map in Color mode at about 30% to give skin nice olive tone and remove redness.

Next, I add skin shimmer by using Select Color Range and selecting brightest skin area with fuzziness around 30-40. I copy selected areas to a new layer, switch it to Screen mode and Gaussian blur it slightly (20-40px) to create even highlights. At this point I might use eraser if some blurring went into unwanted areas like eyes or lips, or leaked onto background.

Next couple of layers would be additional dodging and burning in Soft Light mode, maybe additional clong that I didn’t do (though I should have) in the beginning.
At the end I would do final toning; here I applied some Cross-Processing , as well as Lighten/Darken Center from Nik Efex.

This is where I stopped. I might come back at a later date and try some other things with this photo; that’s why I keep layered TIFFs just in that case.

I met with aspiring model Christina few days ago for a short photo session. As usual trying different lighting setups.

3 point lighting here:

2 lights here:

1 light in this series. I like funky style:

The cookbook that I worked on wins the best culinary history book award. Check out details here.

Another year is gone and now it’s time to make the plans for 2011. I am very informal person, and all kinds of schedules and long term goals don’t work well for me but I realize that I will not grow in photography business unless I will set goals for the year and will try to achieve or exceed them. Let’s see, how about finally putting proper business plan together? There are few things I need to define for myself:

• What do I really want to photograph. I like to shoot many different things but there has to be a borderline between commercial and personal work.
• I need to start active marketing. Passive marketing worked decently me last year but that isn’t sufficient in order to get bigger and better clients.
• There is still a lot to learn about technical aspects of photography. I need to focus on advancing in lighting areas without investing anymore in hardware.
• As usual content and creativity is the key in photography. I realize that sometimes I don’t open up completely to the concepts I have in my mind. I need to streamline workflow from the first electrical impulse in the brain to the final delivered print.

Even putting the questions for myself on the paper is hard, not talking about executing them. Let’s see what new year brings.

And to finish off with some imagery let me present model and dancer Anastasia: