Behind the scenes "Orange is the Sky" by Kristina Varaksina

Today we have other guest post, in this case by photographer Kristina Varaksina (website):

“Orange is the Sky” is an emotional portrait, as I call it. The portrait of a young girl with oranges.

The emotion here is created by the color. I wanted the color to be deep, like the green in the background, playful like the oranges on the table and sweet and soft like the pink curtain. All you need is a great model with deep brown eyes looking at the viewer openly, with a slight curiosity in her stare.



For this picture I wanted the softest light possible. Window, of course is a great source of a diffused light, but that wasn't all I needed. The subject was side lit, so I needed other light sources to fill in the shadow part and to highlight important details. The challenge was to combine natural and artificial light, at the same time keeping the feeling that the subject is lit by the window light.

I had a ProFoto Acute2 1200 power pack with 2 strobe heads connected to it. As you can see in the lighting scheme, the strobe with a strip soft box on it is standing on the camera right side of the subject.


I used that light to lighten up the girl’s hair and the left side (camera right) of her face and her shoulder.

The second strobe with a large soft box was used to bounce the light off of the ceiling and give a nice fill to the set overall. Power ratio was 1 to 2 between the first and the second head.

My camera settings were 1/80s, f/7.1, at ISO 200.

I shot this with Canon 5D Mark III using my favorite portrait lens, Canon 85mm f/1.2. It’s great for portraiture not only because of its great sharpness, but also because of the realistic to human eye perspective that the 85 mm angle gives.

After color correcting and choosing a final crop in Capture One Pro, I exported the image to Adobe Photoshop to work on details. I started with cleaning up the table, getting rid of the back of a chair behind the model, replacing the oranges with the better ones from another shot. Then I cleaned up the stray hair, smoothened out the skin tone on the face and the hands, cleaned up the background wall, made the curtain’s color slightly more vivid. My final adjustments were sharpness and grain, overall color and contrast balancing.

Shooting time, including the model's prep time and light testing: 1 hour.

Editing and retouching time: 3.5 hours.

Credits:
Kristina Varaksina kristinavaraksina.com
Espen Øydvin, Set designer, https://www.behance.net/espenoydvin
Inna Mathews, Hair and Makeup artist, innamathews.com
Isabella Ho, Model


Thanks for sharing Kristina | website