Nude Photography Course

I recently gave a workshop on studio nude photography and managed to take a few shots while I was demonstrating various camera settings and lighting techniques. I was working with this particular model for the first time and thought she had a 50's style glamour. So when it came to processing this picture I started out looking for a retro feel. I was planning on a contrasty black and white or sepia image, but along the way I tried out one of the in-built Aperture adjustment presets called "Vintage" and I liked the result enough to keep it that way - with a bit of additional vignette and touch of skin smoothing thrown in for good measure.

Technical Information

Camera: Canon EOS 7D DSLR

Lens: EF28-70f2.8L at 28mm

Exposure: f7.1, 1/125, ISO200

Lighting

The lighting for this photograph comes from a studio flash with 6' vertical softbox to the right of the model (see side lighting for boudoir photography for more details). Interestingly there was a lot of ambient light in the studio so I was able to balance the shadows by adjusting the shutter speed - the lower the shutter speed the more ambient light lifted the shadows on the left of the model.

Post Processing

Only been a few simple post-processing steps:

Vintage color preset in Aperture3
Vignette effect, Aperture 3.
Aperture3 Skin Smoothing filter applied everywhere (Radius 10.0, Detail 0.75, Intensity 0.29). This is quite an agressive setting as I wanted to soften the image a lot, rather than just smooth the skin.

In all, the post processing probably only took a few minutes.

For more information on the technical details see here: lighting, exposure, iso.

Go back to Nude Photography Gallery

Remember - if you have an image you would like to be featured then please take a minute to upload it here.