"Sixty Minutes To Showtime"

"Sixty Minutes To Showtime"
©David A. Ziser

I made this image literally just about 60 or 90 min. before the time the Bar Mitzvah celebration was to begin. As I mentioned in yesterday's post we were on-site pretty early on the day of the big event. Once the family arrives we were ready to go and we jumped right into high gear to get “signature” portrait series of our young Bar Mitzvah Tat I strive for for my clients.  And I was completed in about 20 minutes, slightly before the rest of the family arrived.

I had worked at this temple before and had a good idea how to compose for the best photographs very quickly. My “ace number one assistant”, Nicholas, was running  the remote light for me and, with him being very experienced in that department, we were able to pull off a series of very cool photographs very quickly.  This is one of those images.

It's really an easy, traditional portrait of our very poised young man just moments before he was going to be leading the entire congregation in the Saturday morning service.  I like three main things about this composition in this image. First, I like how all the backs of the chairs swing around leading the viewer’s eye right back to our young subject.  I also like how I used the dark walnut wall decor in the background as an “interior frame” behind my subject. I also like how the height of the wall décor gradually gets larger leading up to the largest portion allowing me to position young Jack against that larger section.  And finally, I like how the scene balances visually with Jack on the right side and the small pipe organ and the two candelabras on the left-hand side of the image.

I did use one Lightroom 4 trick to finish the presentation. To create a bit more color contrast between our young Bar Mitzvah and the background, I use the adjustment brush and “brushed” our young subject a bit more on the cool side. Then, after closing adjustment brush I warmed up the entire image to counterbalance the cooling effect I selectively applied to our subject. The net effect is to have him "pop" right out of the scene now very much warmer than it was originally. This technique allowed me to create an image that invites the eye to go more directly to our main subject.

Camera specs:  Canon 5D Mark III fitted with Tamron 28–300mm VC lens at 46 MM,F6.3 @ 1/40 second , ISO 1600.  Enjoy!– David