In this post I’m going to break down how I created the last image I posted. I planned out in advance how I wanted the photo to look and feel and scouted the location the night before.

I set up my camera on a tripod and lit each of the girls individually, starting from the left and using a beauty dish and a soft box.

Once I was happy with the shots of Casey, I repositioned my lights and shot Anna.

I moved my lights again and shot Jessica.

Lastly, I took a number of different shots of the scene with varying exposures.

I did all my tweaking and color correction in Adobe Camera Raw before importing all the images as layers into Photoshop. I created a mask for each layer and painted in the area I wanted to show using brushes with varying hardness and opacity, working carefully to keep the light and shadows as realistic as possible. I then used one of my base scene images to fix a couple areas and finish the image.

Special thanks to my friend Trevor who accompanied me to help with the lighting, primarily to hold the beauty dish because I still haven’t made a mount for it yet.