A few years ago, I became acquainted with the work of Jaime Ibarra. Around the same time, I started paying attention to color grading – initially in movies and later in photography.
Ming Thein has written about the cinematic look – it’s one of his favorite photographic styles. He says that “obvious hallmarks of the style are an abundance of out of focus areas, a narrow/wide format, and highly directional light.”
Add to that color – in particular, color in the highlights and shadows.
Jaime has recently updated his color grading workflow – which inspired me to dive back into that technique again. The technique delivers a very compelling cinematic image. It’s based on adding contouring highlights and shadows first to the image followed by the color grading. The effect is almost three dimensional – taking flat images into having depth. You’ll see that in these images – lovely depth of lights and shadows along with beautiful cinematic color grading. Enjoy!
Here are a few of my recent experiments – using recent images from New York City and Paris.
