What do you do when your in a rut?

Lately I've been getting frustrated shooting the same things day in and day out. Its not that I'm complaining, a bad day photographing is better than a good day doing anything else, its just that sometimes I run into a creative rut. My way to combat this is to photograph something totally out of my realm. Take this past week for instance, I photographed three separate genres of photography over the period of three days. The first was something more along the lines of my style with a very thought out and deliberate lighting setup. The second was much more of a high fashion feel, something that I don't normally do, and the third was straight up rock and roll, in your face band photography, which I've only ever done once before. All three shoots required a different way of looking at things. The first was more about the style and color, the second about the look and emotion, and the third about the persona. It was a great exercise in thinking outside of the box and it opened up my mind to the potential of new ideas. My point is that when you feel yourself slipping creatively, open yourself up to the possibility of stepping outside of your comfort zone. More often than not, you will surprise yourself at how rewarding these types of experiences can be and it allows you to take a step back and really evaluate how you photograph. I knew by the end of the week I was a better photographer because of it.

See you next week!

From Start to Finish- Part 4

Alright, now on to the part that I think everyone has been waiting for...wait for it....wait for it....THE JOYS OF PHOTOSHOP!!! (echo reverberates throughout the land.) Anyways, the best way to approach something like this is to come up with some sort of gameplan as to how you're going to do it! my gameplan was to outline all the necessary components using the pen tool, punch them out from the backgrounds, and then composite them onto the background plate which was also shot separately. The pen tool is essential for something like this because it allows you to be super precise and it allows you to go back to it later on if you need to change the shape. The key to make a seemless selection with it is to utilize both the feather and smooth selection commands under the select menu. For this particular project, i generally used a feather of 1 pixel and a smooth of 2 pixels, this gave me a nice feathered edge to all of the components which made them look more natural. Once this was accomplished, there was general perspective changes that needed to be done in order to blend everything with each other. It was anything drastic as I followed the perspectives of each object pretty closely when I photographed them, but it was something that needed to be done to augment the feel of the photo. I like to use the perspective function for this (edit, transform, perspective) just because its simple to use. From here it was just a matter of getting everything where I needed it. One of the problems I was running into was that the components didn't look anchored in anyway to the background. To solve this I needed to do a shadow layer which would make things look like they had weight. There's a couple ways of doing this, you could do a dodge/burn layer and just burn in some shadows where necessary, you could do a curves adjustment layer with a mask to punch out any unnecessary areas. They way I did it was just to make an empty layer and paint in the shadows with a low opacity brush set to black. This really did the trick and made the components look like they weren't floating in the picture. Now, to get that animated look in my images is a little tougher. There are a million ways of doing this as well, of which I don't have the space to go over here. The way that I do it mostly is with several high pass filter layers, set at varying radiuses, followed by an unsharp mask layer with a high radius count, and finally a 50% gray layer set to the overlay blending mode. With this layer I paint in highlights and shadows with a low opacity black/white brush. The trick to all of this lies soley with the original lighting setup. If you don't follow the natural behavior of the lighting, your shadows won't make sense and your highlights will look strange. That's really all there is to it, it's been a great project (even my wife, the "Lois Lane" in the picture, had a good time helping me with this one.) and I'm looking forward to the next one!
See you next week!

From Start to Finish- Part 3

When last we met our hero shot had progressed to the point where principle photography was about to begin. This would include the green screen shots of myself and some of the extra goodies like the suitcoat and glasses. I wanted to keep it simple but at the same time keep the lighting in line with what I did for the phone booth. I decided to do a reflective umbrella on camera left for the main illumination and a grid spot to pick up highlights on the shirt and the side of my face. To round it out, I added a third light to make sure the background was nice and shadow free. This was my first attempt at using a green screen and I must say I was pleasantly suprised at how well it worked. The whole point of using the chromakey background was to make it easier later on when I went to isolate the subjects from the background. The only problem I ran into was having a bit of the green walls reflect in my wig, which I solved by moving myself further from the background. After that it was just a simple matter of taking the shot, reviewing it in the camera to see if it was going to match the angle and lighting, rinse and repeat. The same could be said for the suitcoat, glasses, and newspaper, just a simple matter of matching angles and lighting again.
Next week: the joys of photoshop!

From Start to Finish- Part 2

Ok, so last week I left off with the sketch. This week I'm going to go over some of the pre production work that went into making this setup. First of all I needed to find a suitable phone booth. In this modern day of cell phones, this was a pretty tall order to come by. I happened to stumble across one a couple of months back when I was walking through a local park. The phone had been ripped out ages ago but the basic form was still intact. The next step involved getting the local parks conservancy office on the phone to obtain the right permit to photograph in their park. I talked to the man in charge, told him what I was doing and when I wanted to do it, and if it was possible to shoot in their area. He said sure and he would send me a permit in the mail. After a couple days of waiting on the mail, the permit showed up and I was off to shoot this phone booth. The only problem was that the booth had mysteriously vanished since last time I saw it. After much searching of the area, I found it buried under a bunch of weeds and debris in a corner of the park. It wasn't much but it was a start. Lighting was pretty simple, a single alien bee 800 set at max power shot into a reflective umbrella off to camera left with the exposure dialed in to allow the ambient light to peak in as well. I stood on the top step of my step stool to get the angle (you should have seen the looks I was getting from people driving by, very interesting.) All in all, the whole thing lasted 20 minutes tops. The next step was to get ahold of a convincing Clark Kent ensemble. After some initial playing in the mirror with my hair (yeah, not gonna work) I decided on a vinyl superman wig I found on ebay. A white button down, colorful tie, sensible slacks, and those all so important spectacles and superman shirt rounded out the look. With all of the attire out of the way, it was time to begin experimenting with green screen!
See you next week!

From Start to Finish- Part 1

Due to circumstances beyond my, ahem, control (curse you playstation 3!) I'm a day behind on my blog post. So, in the interest of keeping things moving forward I am going to try something a bit different. I have been working on a project now for the past month and I thought it would be interesting to document the whole thing from beginning to end. This will be a multi-part blog-a-thon over the next couple of weeks so stay tuned to get to the final image.
Okay, let's start at square one. I have come up with this idea of doing a book of editorial portraits of some friends of mine. Each one of these people (and they know who they are!) has a unique characteristic about their personality that would translate really well over to the visual media that we know and love as photography. So, I mentioned this idea to a couple of said friends and the response was luke warm. Hmm, how do I get them more excited about having their picture taken, you ask. Simple, I will take one of myself first! I guess I will need an idea. Well considering that these will be editorial illustrative portraits, it really was a no brainer for me to do something Superman related (for those that don't know me, I am a huge superman fan, in fact I have a whole bedroom in my house chock full of superman memorabilia.) Ok, so I have an idea, how do I do it. The only way that this was going to work in my eyes was a composite. I wanted something that would look cartoony and distorted and down right fun. So my initial thought was to have me flying through the city up up and away style. Well, once I ran through the logistics of the composite it just wasn't going to happen. I finally settled on a more classic pose of superman coming out of a phone booth mid wardrobe change only to be discovered by a very surprised Lois lane (more on this later, I told you it would pay to stick around!) So, without further ado, here is the initial sketch


lovely, isn't it.... Ok, Ok, so it's not a picasso but it gets the point across. Next week I'll go over the ins and outs of prop location! See ya then

When your given lemons...

I recently had an editorial portrait published that has an interesting story. I was contacted for an assignment that involved photographing a local artisan working on some of his jewelry. Ok, no problem, pretty standard stuff. All the art director wanted was a shot of him working on some of his pieces in his workshop. I loaded up the SUV and headed over thinking this would take me all of 30 minutes tops. I even hesitated bringing some of the lighting, thinking that I would just throw on a hotshoe flash on a stand ala "strobist" style and grab something quick. Well, as luck would have it, when I got there the artist informed me that his workshop was in the process of being dismantled so we couldn't get a shot of him working. Ok, no problem (again), I would just have to think of something quick in lieu of the workshop shot. So we got to talking and it just so happens that he has a particular idea that he would be interested in trying out if I'm game for it. Being the adventurous type, I said sure and the next thing you know I'm photographing him in his bathtub! The shoot lasted over an hour and we got some fantastic images. The moral of the story is always keep an open mind and sometimes the best images will just come to you.

See you next week!

Ok, so I've gotten a few questions about how I did one of my photographs so I thought I would post the before and after. The bulk of the image was done with latex makeup and the remainder was done in photoshop using the clone stamp tool with the opacity and flow set to around 40 percent. When your doing something like this, it's important to just take your time and go over the area with the clone tool several times at a low opacity. This gives the image a much more realistic look and you have more control over the final product.

Thanks for looking!