Andrew

This week we did some studio photos of this very serious young man named Andrew. I also recently purchased the Nik Tools Complete Collection for Lightroom (on Preston's strong recommendation), and this Black and White is my first conversion using the Silver Efex plug-in. I used the 'Dark Sepia' preset, then increased lightness and reduced contrast a bit. I like the results and I'm looking forward to trying out some of the other tools, particularly the new HDR Efex.

The other significant thing about this session was the use of the 'Artic Butterfly' dust removal tool. We obviously shot this on white and in doing some test shots I realized I had a boatload of dust on the sensor. I think I reported doing a 'wet' cleaning of the sensor around 6 months ago. I bought the Artic Butterfly around the same time but had not needed to use it until now and it worked really well - I didn't need to do any spotting of the photos from this session.

A word of caution: if you plan to use a brush on your sensor be sure to do a 'wet' cleaning first, in case you have oil spots on the sensor as I did. I quickly ruined my first sensor brush this way.

Nikon D3, AF-S Nikkor 24-70 f/2.8 @ 70mm, 1/125 @ f/10, ISO 200, Handheld, Studio