Fremont Zombies 2011

Yup! It happened again. The Fremont neighborhood of Seattle was overrun with zombies for the third year in a row. Sounds like they got themselves another turn out for the record books. They've also got a web site and a convention (for which I took the photo of the hand holding the eyeball)

It may not be apparent at first, but photographing zombies can be a challenge! One of the biggest challenges is in the post-processing. Being a "people" photographer, I'm always tempted to try to fix the skin a bit. Take some of the grayish green out, take out that little(?) blemish, simple little things. I have to stop and remind myself that these creatures do have grayish green skin with a few marks on it. It is OK.

This year I did some extra processing that I don't usually do a lot of. All of the work here was processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. The images started off as large JPGs from a Canon 7D with a Canon 70-200L IS F/4 lens (most of the images were taken at f/4 or f/4.5). I went with JPG because I was going to be taking a lot of photos and I tried to stay in a spot with decent, soft, even lighting. At the time I took the photos I was not anticipating doing any post processing. Just a bunch of casual zombie portraits.

But once I had them on the screen, I decided to play a bit, and here are the results. All changes were made in Lightroom, with no additional plug-ins. The basic changes were done by boosting the Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Brightness, Contrast, and Clarity sliders. And I added some Hightlight Priority Post-Crop vignetting to most. Some have a Medium Contrast and some have a Strong Contrast Tone Curve. Then I played with the Exposure setting for each to get the brightness in line. I included a screen shot of the Lightroom settings for the last image

Here is a random sampling of photos from yesterday's Zombie Walk for your viewing pleasure...

 

 

You can find more photos from 2009-2011 on my website