Behind The Frame 04

I had envisioned this shot of my fiancée standing in a poppy field for quite some time. In my head, it sounded simple, but in practice, it became one of my most difficult shots to pull off.

It was late June, with poppy season already fading, and I knew we had just one last chance. We jumped in the car and started searching.

The challenge with chasing a specific vision (instead of shooting spontaneously) is that so many variables need to align: the right poppy field, the weather, and above all, the right sun direction.

After hours of driving, we finally discovered the perfect spot. My fiancée carefully stepped into the field while I began hunting for the frame. The sun, however, was still too high, leaving the light and shadows harsher than I had hoped.

After some trial and error, I realized that shooting from a higher angle gave me the result I wanted, shifting the focus from the sun light to the texture of the poppy field itself.

I quickly climbed on our car and took the shot.

I positioned my fiancée facing the sun and then angled the camera so the backlight hit slightly from the side. That’s just personal preference, of course, some people love direct backlight, others prefer front light. For me, this setup strikes the perfect balance and has become my go-to. If you want to learn more about shooting with sun light check out this post.

As always I applied my LUT first and played around with the intensity, contrast ratio and saturation. This shot was a bit tricky as the afternoon sun forced me to max out the ND filter I used, I think it was at around 5 stops in total. I try to avoid doing this normally as it results in a greenish tint and overall worse color quality.

If you’ve read my other shot breakdowns, you’ve probably noticed that my process is always pretty similar:

Once I am happy with the overall look, I add a cold vignette to draw the viewer’s attention toward my subject. The cooler tone creates a very stylized effect, I personally love it, though it can feel a bit much for some. At the end of the day, it’s all a matter of taste, but definitely worth experimenting with!

My next step was enhancing the colors and brightness of my subject. Since I had to adjust the overall tones to get rid of a greenish tint, the colors on my subject didn’t look quite right anymore. To fix this, I simply masked her out and added a touch of warmth, saturation, and highlight brightness until it matched the look I had in mind.

As a last detail I added some radial blur in After Effects but I will make a separate post about that soon!

Done!

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If you want to try it out yourself, you can sign up below for a 14-day free trial. My personal playlist is live too, so you’ll be able to scroll through some of my favorite tracks!

Exact camera settings from the Blackmagic Camera app

Thanks so much for being here, I genuinely appreciate every single reader.
If you ever have questions or ideas for future issues, feel free to shoot me a DM on Instagram!

Until next time,

Stefan

Minimal tools. Maximum creativity.