Karissa Carlson

In a previous post, I explained how I wanted to redo the “Death’s Messenger” shot by the cemetery gates. I reshot it last Friday, here are the results:

Here is the original photo with a diagram of how I wanted to change it:

I did not add water to the path, nor did I use a back light (the sun did that job). I did balance my camera to tungsten in order to “cool” down the warm sunset, then I warmed up my strobes with full CTO gels in order to bring them back to white. In Photoshop, I removed a lot of that awful cyan color (awful in my opinion) that is so prevalent whenever you use the tungsten white balance in daylight. I’m still not sure if I’m happy with the color, but I know that I want the image to feel cool in tone and creepy in mood. So you can see the effect of color balancing strobes and using tungsten white balance, here is what the image would have looked like had I used auto white balance in camera. Note the orange color of the strobes because of the CTO gels and the yellowness of the sun:

On a side note, I actually had a run in with the campus security at SMU during this shoot! The security guard inquired about what I was doing, and I calmly explained. He was kind enough to let me finish the shoot.