Yesterday on my Facebook page, I mentioned I was time traveling, going back to 2007 to re-process and keyword some early images to go into my non-Stocksy portfolio of stock images. Today, I thought I would post a couple of samples to illustrate what I was talking about.
I’m still going back through my portfolio, adding meta-data to images and reprocessing them if needed. I’ve been wanting to get back to this series from 2007 for a while, but I knew it would take several hours to get through. It was one of my early location shoots, shot at a local gymnasium/fitness center. I think I had originally had four or five models set up, but only two showed up. Luckily, they both did a great job of looking like people who would be working out in a gym.
This first image was a big seller over the years. However, it always bothered me that I didn’t expand the canvas a bit and clone in hair from another version of the image. Yesterday, I took the time to do that. Also, as you can see, the image has a slight pink cast, and is a bit on the bright side. Today’s buyers are tending to like more “natural” processing, mixed in with the kind of look you get from Instagram and other filter programs. Even though I was using strobes in this location, I don’t think that comes across as being overly obvious. I wanted to darken it to look like ambient light to start, so I lowered the exposure in my conversion from the RAW file.
Looking back now, I’m glad I started shooting right away in RAW format with my Digital Rebel in 2004. I then corrected the temperature and tint in the conversion to lose the pink tint. Back in the day, I was using a laptop for all my photography work, and the color was obviously off, even though it looked fine to me at the time. I’m not sure at what point I started using a Spyder to check my monitor, but even then, I wasn’t sure it was correct. Now I use a ColorMunki, and it does a great job of calibration.
Here are the before and after files for the image.
This next image suffered from the same issues. Pink cast. Too bright. Again, I went back to the RAW file and corrected the issues. The different temperature/tint gave some bluish/green color to the weights, which I like. I tend to see that at my gym from the mirrors and glass that have that slight color to it. I also used a Nik filter to create an overlay layer that had a little bit of “grit” to it, to make the arm and hand a little more on the “tough” side.
I re-processed most of the series, and I really like the way they came out. I worked in some images I didn’t initially use, because the composition works for today’s style. I almost tried to submit this series to Stocksy United, but with only two models in the series, I thought it might come across as not “authentic” enough, and I did have some posing in there that may not have made the cut. Right now though, you can find these images in my portfolio at Shutterstock.
Seven years from now, will I go back and rework these yet again? Hopefully not!
