This is one of my favourite types of photos. A close-up portrait with gorgeous backlight, and of course my favourite perfect model.

Journey is a really difficult one to get the white balance correct with, especially in these conditions as not only is he a weird colour, but there were oranges, yellows and greens bouncing off EVERYWHERE, plus the already warm golden light from the evening sun. You’ll see me obsessing a bit with the WB well into the Photoshop part of my edit.

Otherwise this one was pretty straightforward and more or less followed my regular workflow – bringing highlights down, altering the colours of the background to have a deeper autumn hue. I had to do quite a lot of brightening up his face, but also trying to keep the balance between the light and dark sides of his face, so the dark side didn’t look fake. After I’d edited and filmed this, I went back and desaturated the left eye a little bit as it was glowing. I also added some radial gradients behind him to really make the background glow, since this was the direction of the light anyway, and helps him to really stand out from the background, especially as he is a red/orange dog on a red/orange background.

 

Equipment used:

Sony a7iii & Sony 135mm f/1.8 lens

Edited with Lightroom and Photoshop

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