Hello and Welcome to Out of the Darkroom
on AdoramaTV,
I'm Ruth Medjber and today
I'm back chatting to Lisa Griffin
all about her production techniques.
Thank you so much for sticking with us
and so if you wouldn't mind talking us
through your post production techniques.
because I’m looking at those images
and I’m like
there's no way they're raw
they're not just straight
off the camera right?
No they're not. Tell us a little bit about
I wish. I know wouldn't it be fabulous
if we could create those fantastical pieces
like in real life. Tell the camera okay
I want purple. Yeah.
It's not purple, I want purple, make it purple.
So how do you do that?
How do you create these things?
Well, obviously just
start with the raw image. Yes.
I bring it into Bridge, bring it going over to
camera raw, kind of adjust it.
Sometimes I get my white balance wrong.
That's okay everybody does it.
Yes white balancing is tricky when
when they're is a big waterfall
and there's all these mixed lights.
Yeah, when you don't have time
to adjust the white balance, you just
shoot, then worry about that later.
Cool that's why we have technology.
Yeah. So you bring it through Bridge and
then do you use Lightroom,
do you use Photoshop?
I use Photoshop. Do you? Yeah. Okay
I learned from YouTube. Wow.
So I find Photoshop easier than
anything else now because I just sat
there for hours and watched every single
YouTube video I could until I was like oh
that's how you use frequency separation
I don't even know what that is.
You should google it. I need to
dedicate a few hours to YouTube tutorials
then, so you are self taught in Photoshop?
Yeah, pretty much. Fantastic and what
would you ,what would
you say are like your main go to tools,
to create the kind of, like floaty, etheral
type scenes that you use?
Well sometimes like,
the model could be perfect but the dress
could be over there and I want the
dress here, so usually I'd see how the
model looks then I'll go through all my
images and say okay well the dress looks
really good here, so I'm just going to
cut the model and then put it in here
and then I would do a little skin retouch,
maybe fix up the background a bit,
and then I kind of go straight into the
colors. Wow!
Yeah I would mainly
use like,
selective color, curves and I like my
images to kind of look a bit flat,
like paintings, but I still want
them to be 3D, so I
bring up the shadows just a little bit
just to bring that little element of
painterly feeling into it and then I
kind of go to town with the colors
I could spend a lot of time editing
pictures just for the color so I would
go into selective color and like
individually, play around with each
color and then curves and everything.
You spend a lot of time on your computer
don't you? I do,
yeah, I spend more time on my computer than
I do shooting. Yeah I think that's general
for everybody. So like say one of
your Icelandic images so the one, you
know the girl with the big blue dress?
In front of Skógafoss, the waterfall.
How many hours of
post-production will go into an image
like that?
On average about 4 or 5 hours
Solid hours?
Yes. That's cool. Now, a few coffee breaks.
Chill out for abit. Yeah.
And maybe look at the next day
and then go 'oh God' what did I do?
Then go back and fix it.
So they say that you have to live
with an image before you release it to the
world or you should live with it for a few
weeks and kind of go, oh no, I was
off my head when I did that,
I need to comeback.
Turn off my computer
and like okay I'm not looking
at anything for 20 hours. Tell us then a
little bit about the gear
that you' d use? Say that
workshop in Iceland what would have
been on site that you had access to?
Yes so we had some Flash photography
and I use my Nikon d7000
and the main lens, that I like to use for
portraiture and fashion is my 85mm.
Yeah. That's my favorite for portraiture
and fashion but when I'm kind of working
with big landscapes I'd usually like a
50mm. Would you?
Yes and stand a bit back and just get it all in the
shot, but obviously its a bit compressed. Yeah.
But that's okay I like to use my 50mm
for kind of, my Fine Art pictures. Wow,
yeah I think the 85mm is a go-to for most
fashion photographers, isn't it?
Oh it's brilliant, isn't it?
Yeah and the d7000 is a good camera, isn't it?
Yeah it's really good.
And then would you work in
a studio when you're doing kind of
indoor portraits that kind of stuff?
Yeah, i hadn't really worked in studio until
I started college this year, so three
months ago was my first time really
using studio and setting it up myself
and stuff, but I'm going to Dún Laoghaire
so my lectures are like in and out and
they're like oh let me show you how to
do this, do you know, they're really helpful
so I've actually started moving more
towards studio photography for now and
just kind of build up a portfolio and that. Yeah.
See where that takes me as well. Cool so you're still
finding your feet there, I think
what you've done already is fantastic so I
think give you another year, you'll be
incredible and then when you're at
the field and like literally in fields.
Yeah. What kind of lighting would you
be using those would be just off-camera
flashes? Natural usually. No!
Yeah sometimes you have to get up really early,
to get the nicest light especially like
in Ireland like it when I was in
Iceland we used Flash obviously and then,
but in Ireland, I don't really have my
own portable Flash system so I just
get that through natural light.
You got to get up earlier wait until the
perfect time to take the shots and,
You've beautiful control over the lighting and
had no idea that it was just all natural
yeah, you know the ones that are in the woods?
Sometimes the reflector is there
Yeah, no. When I'm shooting in
the woods we would go to the location
beforehand to go okay, so, the light
comes through the trees nicely here and
maybe over there
it's a bit too dark. Yeah. And then okay so we'll
do our setup here, like I did a shoot in Cork
one day, and it was just, we knew exactly
where we were shooting.
We brought the whole set down,
Okay. And we plonked the model there,
the light was just
perfect for the hour but that's
because you've done a recce, you'd known what
was going ahead. Yeah. So you do a lot of prep work?
Oh yeah, you need to you're like
you want to get in and get out
especially when you're shooting outside
in Ireland because it's raining and cold all
the time you don't want your model
getting cold.
Okay so you have to be well prepared then
Yes. And then what about anything else
that you might use I mean did I see
like some smoke coming through? You did.
Do you know those pellets that you can get for
your fireplace to check to see if your
chimney is working? No! Yes ebay.
Seriously smoke pellets, yeah, oh my gosh,
look at all these tricks. I love it!
Get them to hold their breath.
Does it stink? It doesnt stink, I'm just
like, hold your
breath for a second then okay, come out,
oh my god fantastic and then tell us a
little bit about set design, and things like that.
Do you do that all yourself or do you have a team of
people helping you?
Myself and my makeup artist
really, she's a makeup artist but
I kind of called her my creative lady
because she just like oh let's just throw
everything on her and then take them off
one by one and see what actually works,
so she's really good, thats Suzanne Dolan,
she's brilliant. She would ike a lot like, she
helps you an awful lot. The two of you kind of
collaborate. Yeah. Come up with these fantastical
pieces, that's great. Yeah
Is there anything else in the works coming up for you?
Not at the moment no.
Are you going to
dedicate your time to your studies?
Yes. And then become an absolute whizz
at everything, beacuase if you can learn
Photoshop that well from YouTube
tutorials and you've been in the studio
for three months I think this time next
year I'm not going to be able to get an
interview with you.
Thank you so much Lisa for
joining me. No worries.
I learned a lot from you
Well that's all we have time for this
episode, I hope you enjoyed the show if
you like to brush up on your own
photography skills. Check out the
Adorama Learning Center and if you want to
watch more videos then subscribe to our
YouTube channel, thanks and I’ll see you
again soon.