My phase AFD sync at 1/60th of a second... I use profoto 7a 1200... I discovered this crappy thing doing copy work, i was going crazy with the light. The only thing i trust is the sync cord... yes it's a cable but the only one that can give me a rock solid sync with the flash. Though, never tried a pocket wizard, too expensive...
By the way, James, i just love your style and your approach with the retouching. One question, do you play around with photoshop and ask the retoucher to do that kind of mood or you know before what you want? Or simply much trust on your retoucher?
Michele
Depending on client, look etc. we work in a lot of different ways.
In this image I process out the base look and then make a jpeg, with about 50 markings of things I want fixed, a wrinkle in the garment, a blotch on the skin, a hair that blew too far forward, etc. etc.
Then I ship the processed tiff, a raw and the instructional jpeg to the retouchers on ftp.
We follow it up with a quick phone conference.
Usually, they send me back a jpeg for review, then a high rez once approved.
At that stage I do most of the coloring myself, usually in layers, erasing some areas like the garment to keep it as close as possible to the real color.
Then I save a master and depending on final use output to different sizes and color spaces.
One thing is I try to keep a web sized running along with a full size image to see how they work. Often what looks over-retouched small looks full detailed when large, so usually one look doesn't fit all.
Regardless, with this image (not everything we do) but with this image the lighting and look were pretty close out of camera. Obviously the broad strokes are fast and easy, the 15% fine tuning is the longest part.
It is also important to step away for a few minutes. Sometimes I work an image so closely in small increments, I'll come back and realize I went to far.
Thank God for the duplicate function in photoshop.
JR
