Judah is a retired veteran of the US Army and a friend as I’ve done a number of photo sessions for his family over the years and his children’s senior photos.
He reached out to me just after he officially retired wanting to get some new portraits for his LinkedIn profile. He said he was looking to move into the corporate world and needed some images that would suit. He didn’t want to be in a studio, but neither did he want “typical” outdoor portraits. I found this awesome location which featured a unique black rock terrain. It provided a very interestingly stark landscape which I thought was both really cool looking, but not distracting from the subject.
We planned to shoot at sunset, however, when the day arrived, there were no clouds at all to give the sky any color or dimension. The empty blue sky had its own charm, but I wanted to make the images a little more dramatic and eye-catching.
Fortunately, the empty sky and smooth horizon also made it very easy to replace in order to accomplish what I envisioned.
We only spent about a total of 30 minutes shooting. We took a few shots with the natural sunlight and a few with some off-camera flash.
Then in post-production, I found a nice stock image of a sunset which had clouds and lots of color and used that to replace the empty blue sky. I used simple selection and masking to hide the empty sky and layer in the new sky. Then did some color correction to make the tones match and added blur to blend with the DOF.
Here are the results which I’m very happy with.
