I found this crazy old winery in the golan (north of israel), and I immediately fell in love with the place. Specifically, the front yard of the winery has some old vines and a gravel road. Those created a wonderful symmetry and a great pallet of color to work with. So with the location set, I started to build a shoot around it. I set a pan in motion. Starting with a model – Hila Bouskela, a designer – Kamelia Mor Toledano; through deciding on the lighting scheme all the way to planning the time of day to get a perfect sky.
Gear
I shot this with a Canon 5d mkIII and a 35mm 1.4L glass. The (relatively) short focal length combined with a wide aperture gave both the right perspective and a nice bokeh. For some of the other shots, I used the Sigma 50mm 1.4 art lens.
Lighting
I only used one light here, a 600W strobe inside a 90cm godox octa. I set the light at camera left roughly at a 45/45 angle. As you can see from the shadows, we were shooting with a hard sun. I set the strobe into HSS and eventually shot at 1/3,200 sec, f/2.8, ISO 125. HSS allowed me to keep the lens open and ISO low while knocking the background down a bit.
Post Processing
My first pass of the photo was done using using frequency separation. In one Workspace you deal with high frequencies (which tend to have mostly textures like Hairs, wrinkles and similar) and a LOW frequency which contains mostly shape and color.. It is a relatively efficient way to get good results quite fast. To wrap it up I used a VSCO preset for final toning and color. (slide right/left to see the before/after)
Other images from this set
These two photos were taken at the same location, using the Sigma 50mm art lens
