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Beautiful Model, Lowest Place on Earth AND my LR edit!

This photo was from an impromptu model shoot I did while in Israel at the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is the lowest point on earth -424 meters (-1,401 feet) below sea level!!!! The landscape is very barren but very beautiful with the aqua water and salt-crusted shore. That and the mountains of Jordan in the distance make for a stunning backdrop.

Some back story. I was so lucky to go on an incredible trip to Israel with 5 amazing photographers thanks to “Vibe Israel” and Kinetis. Each photographer was handpicked from New York to Australia and in-between. I will go more in depth on each photographer in another video post, but for now, lets just say I was in very good company and feeling incredibly inspired.

Back to the shoot. We had planned to meet our models around 4am and then drive down to a special location at the Dead Sea just before sunrise to capture that very special light. Turns out that there were torrential rain storms and lightning storms that night that went well into the morning. The rains were so bad that the roads were washed out and our models almost didn’t make it.

The rain finally let up around 6am and we headed down despite some light showers. I kept my setup pretty basic. Canon 5DMKIII and 85mm f/1.2. I used a couple of SB800’s and one umbrella triggered with PocketWizard PlusIII’s, mounted on Manfrotto nano stands. It was pretty windy so I ended up just using the flashes bare because there was no way to keep the umbrella from flying away. Later, I was able to borrow Mike Kelley’s generic 600ws flashgun that was pretty awesome and saved the day. Not that my SB800’s weren’t up to task, but his moonlight was way more kick ass.

The sun came out and the colors just popped. Everything was a gorgeous pastel and we even had some clouds in the distance – a rarity for that area. We had great synergy shooting and I gave Miriam @miriamzarkov a black piece of sheer fabric to fly in the wind which I feel really made the shots. I didn’t have a chance to sort any fancy garments for her, so that piece of fabric made all the difference and Miriam really had fun with it.

In this video, I take you guys through my editing process in Lightroom 5 from beginning to end. You get to see exactly what I did and why I made those choices to get my final results. I’m really happy with how things turned out and I hope you find this helpful to your editing as well.

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