Yesterday I shared my article on using Low Contrast lens filters in your portrait shots. It's always good to see an article you've worked on for so long be popular, so thank you to those of you that checked it out.
The premise of the article was around the idea that using lens filters in front of your lens like the low contrast one, is hugely beneficial in the right situations and certainly far more so than using a post-pro solution instead.

Don't get wrong, you shouldn't be using them for every shot you take, but for the right shot, it can take an image in a completely different direction.

In this shot for example I'm using my Definitive gel pack colours that are very saturated. To soften the overall look I'm using a low contrast filter on the lens to try and balance out some of the tones. Look at the very dark shadow area under the chin. See how little light we have in there? Couple that with very shiny jet-black styling and you have a recipe for a complete black-out in terms of shadow detail.

Sure this wouldn't be a problem if I was using a lot more light or even soft box light, but with gels, we need a harder more directional light source to achieve the colours we want.
In this instance the low contrast filter gives us some extra options and certainly a lot more detail in the shadows for us to work with in post.

As it happens, we ended up taking this set in a different direction, so I only shot a couple of this particular setup and colour combo. I still thought it was valuable to share this though as yet another example of the low contrast filter in action.

If you missed the article, be sure to scroll back on my page to yesterday to check it out for more examples and solutions. Did you guys have any questions that came from that article? Or in fact this image or the low contrast filters in general?
Let me know.

Model: Alicia Conder
Assist : Jaye Hicks