Yesterday I did a photograph to promote an archaeology festival. The festival started today so the picture was needed for today's paper, which meant setting it up ahead of time. We arranged with a local museum to do the picture on Friday, and a friend kindly lent me two of her kids, both of whom I've worked with before so I knew they would be good models.

The shoot took a lot longer than I expected because, firstly, my flash went in to some weird mode and wouldn't reset, so I couldn't use it. Then I did some ambient-only shots but they lacked impact. Eventually we ended up doing a full production shot with two studio strobes lighting the kids front and back, with the strobes held by the kids' mother and the museum chairman to stop them blowing over in the breeze. This was a team effort!

With the shoot having over-run and another booking 90 minutes later, a quick turnaround was required, which wasn't helped by the fact that I didn't like any of the pictures. I eventually selected four to send over to the picture desk, and as soon as I'd sent them I had the nagging feeling that the (deliberate) over-exposure on the kids' faces was too much. So, clock ticking, I set about re-processing all four images from the raw files.

Thanks to the wraparound lighting I was able to use the high-contrast processing technique that has been made famous by Dave Hill. The final pictures looked much nicer than the originals, being slightly surreal with a strong 3D effect.

In the end there was one picture that I really liked and that was the one that appeared in today's Press & Journal. It ran large, about five times the size of the accompanying article, so I guess the picture editor liked it too.

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Here are a couple of the alternative frames. There was another okay-ish frame that was very similar to the one shown above, but not as good.

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And for comparison, here's the published photo without the processing:

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