Sunrise Punch

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Kick it up a notch–Maybe two

A friend of mine had a party recently with half of them being musicians who spend the evening playing Rock and Roll, Blues, Jazz and whatever else catches their fancy.  While they played I took pictures.  I don’t use my add on flash as much as I’d like and this provided a great opportunity.  The basic setup is shutter priority with your shutter set to a 60^th sec.  I haven’t liked the results because the aperture is usually wide open resulting in a shallow depth of field.  I’ve found that’s okay if you have one subject in the image.  With more subjects in the image and a shallow depth of field, one subject will look fine but the other subjects will be less sharp and that annoys the heck outta me.  So I set the aperture priority to f8.

I got a lot of nice shots but I was looking to do a little more with a few of them.   I’ve got a lot of Presets in Lightroom but none of them really caught my fancy.  Then I viewed Episode 247 of Photoshop User TV.   Scott Kelby explained a tutorial creating a bleached bypass effect in Photoshop.  Duplicate the background layer twice.  Then desaturate the middle layer and change it’s opacity to 80%.  Switch to the top layer and change the blend mode to Overlay. Quick and easy and a nice effect.  Bringing the image back into Lightroom,  I did some minor adjustments and then used a Develop Preset that mimics the look from the movie “300” and I was done.