Exposure fan, Lara Jade, is currently one of the hottest commodities in the world of fashion photography. After starting her photography business at the age of just 17, Lara’s rise to the top of the industry has been nothing short of meteoric. She’s photographed for clients such as P&G, Goldsmiths, Fantasie Lingerie, Harper Collins and Sony Music, and her images have appeared in such prestigious publications as The Observer, Tatler, Huffington Post, Marie Claire Indonesia and Vogue Wedding Japan. Lara has been fortunate enough to receive a number of sponsorships and accolades, including Canon, Broncolor and Datacolor. She was also winner of the Public Choice Award at the 2009 Association of Photographers Open Awards.
Lara names her primary influences as film noir and the old masters in painting and photography. She defines her most compelling quality as her ability to colour her images with strong elements of romanticism and fantasy while creating the sense of an underlying narrative. It is in this area that Lara turns to Exposure to fine-tune her images.
We recently caught up with Lara to learn about how she uses Exposure as part of her wider post-production workflow:
“As with all photography, my workflow starts with my camera. I shoot with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III, primarily with the 50mm 1.2 and 85mm 1.2 lenses. I shoot RAW files into CF cards to obtain the highest possible image quality for my clients. I never shoot JPEGs as quality always needs to be at its highest. I always process my RAW files into TIFF then resize to JPEG if needed for clients or for web viewing.”
“For my editing and post-production, my images are imported and archived into folders on my hard drive using Lightroom. I then pull my RAW files into Lightroom’s “Develop” module where I flag, star and colour my selections before moving my selections into Photoshop where I do the vast majority of my post-processing.”
“Alien Skin Exposure 5 has been a key part in my retouching workflow over the past couple of years. I never thought a filter program could be so useful! The program has really opened my eyes to understanding colour and how best to use it in various environments.”
“When using Exposure, I am always tweaking the filters to my requirements. My favourite filters are the ‘Polaroid’ set and the B&W. I always finish my images by using Exposure’s grain tool set between 20-25%. If I’m using Exposure filters for an image I usually add my own curves and selective colour adjustments on top of the filter process to make it true to my style.”
“The best part for me (and possibly every photographer out there) is that, with Exposure, you can finely adjust the settings of each filter to be unique to your style, and then save them as your own custom presets. If you haven’t tried out the ‘Polaroid’ filters yet, you’re missing out!”
Lara likes to stay busy and she already has a lot of exciting events planned for 2014. She will be running a series of workshops in collaboration with Back To Front, who she’ll also be working with on a new photography-themed reality TV show.
You can find out more about Lara’s style of shooting, post-processing and workshops over on her Facebook page, where she is always providing tips, interacting and answering questions from her almost 300,000 followers.
It’s always really nice to hear back from our fans about their experiences with Alien Skin products, so we were very pleased to hear from Lara. If you’d like to share your approach to using our products for stills or video work, please drop us a line with some sample images at blog@alienskin.com.
We look forward to hearing from you and seeing all your great work.
Have a brilliant weekend, everyone!
Cheers,
Joe
Try Exposure Today
To be honest I never heard about Lara but she’s images are fantastic! Its also worth to know how she is processing them.
If you’re interested in knowing a bit more about how Lara processes her images, as well as building a career in fashion photography, she’s written a book, Fashion Photography 101, published in the UK, Australia and NZ by Ilex and in the USA by Pixiq (Amazon USA), and also available as an eBook. Well worth a read – it’s already reprinted and been translated into French!
I like the pic with the cats and the pic with the three models on the old iron bedstead best.
Take a look at http://www.Nicholson.net-model .com for retro fashion images of the 1920s to 1970s. 5 of the pics are “stills” from two retro simulated TV 1970s adverts, and others are “faded” to look like early Kodak Ektachrome E1 sheet film.