Rangefinder Magazine
August 2005

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The Last Word by DEETTE SALLEE

Recently, my husband, JB, and I were in Hawaii shooting a destination wedding. It was also our one-year wedding anniversary (the paper anniversary), so I brought along my wedding dress to shoot some one-year bridals as a gift for JB.

I set up the shot with my brother in my place on the fence and set the camera to manual (so he could press the shutter for me). The photo was shot horizontally because I wanted to be able to crop it as a panoramic later to add a bit of flair to the image. I spot-metered for the sky so as not to lose detail in the clouds, and I set the camera at 1/160 at f/9. To fill in the detail on the grass, I used a Nikon SB-800 AF Speedlight at 1/16-power. My brother fired off about 30 shots with different poses, and I picked this image as my favorite.

The photograph was made with a Nikon D2X in manual mode at ISO 100 with a 17–35mm f/2.8D ED-IF AF-S Zoom-Nikkor lens at the 17mm setting, and a Nikon SB-800 AF Speedlight. The camera was mounted on a tripod.

Using Nikon D2X Resize Pro (a Fred Miranda action), the image was resized to a 30x20 at 300dpi. Then I cropped the image to 30x12 inches at 300dpi.

We don’t use any sharpening filter in the camera, so I used a sharpening filter in Photoshop CS. I wanted to keep the image soft and dreamy, so I duplicated the layer and then dropped opacity to 33 percent on top of the sharpened layer.

To change the image tone to sepia, first I changed the color mode to grayscale and dumped the color information. Next I adjusted the brightness and contrast to give the clouds a little more “pop,” but not too much.

Once the image looked good in grayscale mode, I switched it back to RGB and started the sepia transition. We have an action set up in Photoshop CS that makes every image the exact same brown tone every time—we call it “Secret Sepia,” and it works great with color or black-and-white images.

First, duplicate your layer. On the top layer run the plug-in “Ink” (available in nik Color Efex Pro 1.0), and drop the opacity to 50 percent. On the bottom layer run Hue/Saturation (check the “colorize” box), and change the layer to whatever looks good to you. We use 25 Hue and 25 Saturation as our favorite recipe.

The last step is changing back to the top layer and adjusting the opacity to what looks best (we use 69 percent). Then flatten the image and adjust contrast as needed.

Sallee Photography was founded by JB and DeEtte Sallee in 2003. They both started their love for photography and for each other at Southwest Texas State University (now called Texas State). JB earned a degree in fine art photography while DeEtte graduated with a minor in photography.

In 2004, JB Sallee was awarded the Hy Sheanin Memorial Scholarship by WPPI, and the pair are considered two of the top up-and-coming wedding and portrait photographers in the country. Visit www.salleephotography.com/.