Accessories make all the difference

Well, camera accessories too, but in this case I’m thinking more of the type of accessories that are in the picture, rather than make the picture happen.

If a model just shows up in street clothes, it may be possible to create an interesting portrait image, but it’s really hard to come up with an appealing studio model shot. First of all, street clothes, and what looks appealing in a shot are two different things. But then, it’s not only about a dress, or pants and a shirt, but also matching accessories – a well fitting pair of shoes, a handbag, a hat, some jewelry. It has to look interesting and appealing.

Here a quick illustration with two images from last Wednesday – same model, one plain (though with good shoes), and one with hat and a small bag, that not only give the hands something to do, but also add a touch of color to the image, and put some natural interest into other areas of the image:

 

What both of these images are missing is some sort of other prop, which can further enhance the image, without becoming a visual distraction. There’s only so many images you can shoot of floor and wall before it’s a lot of the same.

Earlier today I took a trip down to Ikea to do some prop hunting at affordable rates. Ended up with a couple of pieces I’m looking forward to play with, and also added a few pieces to my wish list once I can figure out how to utilize them.

Prop and accessories are things that are acquired over time, and I’m always on the look out. Just like locations, textures, and other backgrounds.

Other things going through my head? Well, I’ve been playing with Photoshop, a never-ending journey of discovery. I watched a video clip on the NAPP site and figured out all the different options the brush tool has that I didn’t know about, such as scatter, size, opacity, and color jitter, etc. Not something that is needed on a layer mask, but more on the design part of Photoshop. I’ve been playing with the design elements a lot more in recent weeks, both in terms of coming up with images that mix photography and design elements, and also just to use in everyday presentation. I think there’s a benefit of dabbling in design, even without intention of becoming a designer. It trains the eye a lot more in creative composition rather than just seeing beauty and pointing the lens at it, and hopefully leads to being more active in realizing visual inspirations.

This goes to a point I commented on the other day on Rick’s blog: I think there are a few stages to photographic development (well, there are many such illustrations – such as George Barr’s skill levels). But for the purpose of making my point here on design: At stage 0, we’re starting out, and are in spray’n’pray shooting mode (one stop above ‘P’ on your camera dial). We don’t know yet how to make a good image, but we hope to capture one. At stage 1, we’ve trained our eye and we become more selective. We say ‘I’ve seen that', or ‘This is boring’. We know to distinguish a good shot from a bad before pressing the button and start exercising restraint. At stage 2, we actually start having visual concepts that we want to create before we take the shot. We change the camera angle, we bring in props, we seek out locations, etc. all in an effort to create that shot we have in our head. And finally at stage 3, we do what we did in stage 2 all the time, except there’s a lot more consistency. In fact so much consistency that others can make out our visual voice, see our style even without knowing who shot it.

The following image used some of the newly discovered brush options on the separator:

I used a calligraphy brush tip with a wider spacing, a size jitter, and a few other dynamics to configure the brush. Then I drew a straight line path at each margin, then using the stroke function to follow the path with the brush. And the brush doesn’t have any color, it’s actually painting a layer mask to reveal an underlying grunge texture that I loaded into the background layer.

Credits top: Kimberly (model), Sheila (make-up)
Credits bottom: Carlee (model), Shyn (make-up & hair)

Quick Link: Promos

Good series of blog posts by Heather on photographer promotions – examples and critique. Great resource.

Photos: Extra Long Hair

The second shoot over the weekend was a project we had been planning for a while – a concept around extra long hair. A great job by hair stylist Jessee, make-up artist Michelle, and model Denisse made for a terrific shoot.

 

During this shoot I had the opportunity to try some new lighting equipment I recently got – a Chinese Lantern (as it’s called in movie terms). The first three shots were lit with a v-bank as key light (a bar strobe shot into a white v-card with a diffuser sheet over the open side). The Chinese Lantern is a globe mounted over a strobe head, on a lightstand pointing straight up. It gives the same omni-directional fill a bare bulb provides, but is a lot softer than a bare bulb. The lighting also involved a flag to subract some lighting opposite the key. The last two shots were backlit with gridded beauty dish and the lantern in the foreground for fill, together with a silver reflector to open up some of the hair just a bit more.

Credits: Denisse (model), Michelle (make-up), Jessee (hair)

Photos: Skate Team at “The Muk”

It’s been a good weekend with some exciting photo shoots. Saturday morning started at the “The Muk” – the YMCA skate park in Mukilteo, a park with deep bowls and some launch ramps. The Anklebiter skate team was looking for some team pictures, and rather than staying indoors we took the opportunity to change locations and take advantage of the Outdoors.

The weather was nice, but since we were there for the 11am – 1pm session time, the earliest they had available in the day and before it would get too crowded, it also meant some of the worst lighting conditions. With action shots it’s a lot harder to use scrims to control the sun light. Given all that, I’m pretty pleased with how things turned out:

I used a variety of techniques to overcome the extreme contrast of the mid-day sun. I used two battery powered strobes at various times, at times with a beauty dish (more durable than softboxes or umbrellas in the outdoors), and a hand-held ringflash. On the 5th shot an assistant held a sun swatter over the rim of the bowl to screm the sun light. In other cases I used a simple reflector disk to get some fill into the faces. The ringlfash actually worked out well, because it allowed me to be more mobile, and avoided adding yet more shadows to manage, or equipment to watch in a very dynamic environment.

The key was finding the right angles and perspectives to highlight the terrific skateboarding the team did. That meant jumping into the bowl with the camera, sitting in the center and letting them skateboard around me in the clam shell, or lying on the ground where they aired out of the bowl and hoping that they controlled their landing enough not to hit me.

Post Exposure Intellectualization

Was catching up on some online reading and came across this nice little write-up on Luminous Landscape.

How many times have you read a critique of an image, listened to a daily critique on TME, or otherwise had a photographer give you feedback, and you always get these interesting comments on composition, rhythms, color harmony, and what not.

All good feedback, rational, and yes, these are all elements that make the photograph work (or not). But heck, when you’re behind the camera, these are not terms floating through your head. So when you listen to the critiques, you say ‘ok, let me see you think about all this when you are behind the camera’.

Well, I think the term ‘post exposure intellectualization’ captures what is really going on. It’s not that we’re having all these conscious thoughts while behind the camera, but this is all a form of Monday morning quarter-backing. But before I’m too dismissive about it, it all actually goes back to form  and mold our visual mind. The next time you’re out there taking images, all the post exposure intellectual exercise becomes a subconscious pre exposure intellectual exercise as you pre-visualize the scene, evaluate the light, and then compose the shot in the view finder focusing not only on the subject but also the background. It’s a tight feedback loop, and the more we circle the wagon, the better the results.

Taking a step & Visual Mindset

Do you get to the point sometimes, where you take stock, and say – gosh, I really need to step this up a notch! Or I thought this was good, but hey, it needs to be a whole lot better!

Well, the last few weeks have been such a moment for me. So I’m embarking on a project over the summer to take my work to another level. I’ve already sketched out the major parameters of what I need to accomplish, have a general game plan and am starting to work out the more specific logistics.

But so that I can stay really focused and true to the goal of the project, this is all I’m going to say about it for now, and I decided that I won’t post any of those images until I’m done and satisfied that I achieved my goal. Look for a recap and what I learned about the experience when it’s all done.

Yeah, so am I saying, come back to this blog in a few months, nothing will happen until then? Well, that would not be savvy in terms of online presence. Nothing like a presence killer than telling everyone that nothing more will happen for a while. A good online presence requires a steady stream of effort, not some stops and starts. So, yes, there will be content on this blog on other topics. So I hope you keep stopping by.

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I do a lot of my work online (website, blog, etc.). So while I look at images for many hours of the day, my desk actually is not surrounded by visual feedback of my work. Have you ever gone into a studio and seen all the work on the wall? I recall walking into Don’s studio in Phoenix and seeing some of his work on the wall. Any portrait studio usually has the walls plastered with work from clients. It is very effective in affecting the mood when you’re in the room. At a portrait studio, seeing large prints on the wall will make the client more likely to pay for the larger size products. Likewise walking into your own studio, or office, and seeing some of your own work on the wall, will give you this reflection of achievement and put you in a more productive mood.

So this week I picked up a few frames, printed a few images on my printer, framed them and hung them on the wall at my workstation. Over time I’m sure I will get tired of some of the images, and replace them with fresher work. But it’s an important part of putting myself into the visual mindset. I’m convinced that surrounding yourself with visual cues throughout the day does train your brain more in terms of creativity when you’re on set and trying to put that next image together.

A powerful statement

OK, a bit off-topic to photography per se, but not necessarily the business of photography…. Very much on the topic of business cards though, something I just wrote about.

I came across this fascinating blog post by Peter Kim on the ‘Google Me’ business card. I’ve been following Peter’s blog since I heard him speak at a conference in New York last year.

So why do I think this is the coolest business card ever? Well, it does say a lot about the quality and your confidence in the quality of your online presence and PR strategy. If you are mostly an offline person, then, no you don’t want point anyone at Google to find out more about you, because they won’t find anything.

But if you have invested a significant amount of energy into your social media and online presence, then it gives you a good calling card. And not only that, it also shows that you’re willing to let them see everything Google can find about you, not only the carefully crafted PR message.

If I google myself, the first 28 results I see are all about me. No ambiguities (now I do know that Google is pretty good at personalizing search results, and others may not exactly see what I see). But the first 3 entries are for my two blogs and my website. And the the rest are a smattering of my other online activities – my Facebook profile, my old photo.net profile, my Amazon profile, my LinkedIn profile, some meeting minutes from my community service on the Planning Commission, a few online forums I participate in, some links to an IEEE standard I authored a long time ago, the link to our studio, my Model Mayhem profile, and a few blogs I commented on. A pretty good rounding out of who I am, not just as a photographer but as a person.

As the comments on Peter’s post point out, there needs to be a small improvement on the Google biz card, because if people want to contact you, they should be able to get your e-mail address, website URL, and phone number (you could argue that the Google search would find it for them, but if the person doesn’t happen to be next to a computer, it does risk annoying them.

So what do you think?

Not quite there yet

You may recall the model test shoot from a few weeks ago. Well since we were doing a swimsuit but were in studio, I thought I would take one or two images on a bluescreen and see if I can use it make a beach image out of it. Not something I do regularly, but taking the extra exposures takes very little effort and enables me to explore these techniques for future reference.

Well – I’ve played with it, but it’s not quite there yet. A few interesting lessons though what is important to make the end-result look realistic:

• The most basic element is getting a good exposure with a green / blue color that doesn’t show up anywhere in the usable images. That makes it easy to do a ‘Select Color’ in PS to build the layer mask.
• The camera perspective between the greenscreen shot and the background shot has to be similar, or it will look visually distorted / out of place. That doesn’t just include the camera angle, but also the focal length of the lens.
• The lighting has to be the same. Light has to come from the same direction in general, the overall light quality has to synchronize, and the light transitions have to make sense.

So looking at the EXIF data of this capture above, I know it was shot at 67mm focal length (with my zoom lens). So I used the filter feature in Lightroom to quickly scan images that would have been shot in this focal length range and that would lend themselves as a background picture. That is actually where it pays off to take images of random backgrounds and other stuff and park them in a folder. Folks may be wondering why you shoot this empty beach or park bench – well that may be why.

Well I found two images that I played with – one a sand dune in Arizona at afternoon sun, and one which is a low tide beach shot from the Washington coast. Below is the attempt to make it work with the second image.

This of course is not a workable result, but there are many good lessons to be taken from this image that will help in the process of coming up with the right result.

But let’s back up one step – I actually tried the sand dune first. Let’s take a look at the two background images:

Well the sand dune was more intriguing for the swimsuit (not that anybody would touch mid-day sand dunes in Arizona with bare skin by lying down, but that is another matter). But one problem that became immediately obvious was that the ground was pure bright. Yet looking at my model image, she is lying on the ground with the light coming from above, leaving a large shadow under her back and all along the transition area. That is impossible to match up visually and look realistic without having to rework all the light on her skin, which defeats the purpose. So I needed to go with an image where the background was mostly dark, which brings me to the second background image.

Well, on this one, the light comes from the wrong angle, it’s backlit instead of front lit. But that is fixable. As you may now see in my attempt above I actually scaled and rotated the background image so that the light direction is more consistent. But that creates a new problem. By doing this rotation, the camera angle is no longer consistent. If you visualize the horizon plane of the background and the foreground images, they ideally should match, or at least be parallel to each other. Not the case. The other problem is that the light in this background image is very specular, while the foreground image has very even lighting.

To make the attempt work I scaled the foreground image, found a position that is somewhat logical and then worked on the transitions. To make it more believable I actually tried to extend some of the sand bars above the skin line and selectively darkened the edges to simulate the body having sunk a tad into the sand.

One final problem that isn’t visible in these images, is that the blue screen being so close to the model actually created some color reflections in the white fabric. Where the bikini touches the blue screen material there’s actually some blue overlay to the white, which is yet another problem to manage. I fixed it by manually adjusting the mask to not exclude that area, and then a hue/sat layer to extract the blue from the white. Finally the scaling of the background/foreground image is out of proportion, and when looking closely you feel that it is out of whack.

Anyway, all this just to show all the elements that have to be carefully managed for a successful composition. That gives even more credit to images done that way, like the Volvo shoot in the f-stop article I quoted Sunday.

So now I have to actually go out and shoot a purposeful background image to finish this project. Knowing the parameters, I will plan to specifically zoom my lens to 67mm or close thereof, shoot a scene that is topically correct for a swimsuit, with a darker ground color, from a camera angle that is just slightly above ground, with relatively soft but bright light come from camera right at about 45 degrees.

Knowing the type of final image I have in mind, the next time I shoot on the bluescreen for the foreground image, I want to make sure I get the right camera angle that will give me the right perspective on the background, the type of lighting I expect to have when shooting the background scene, and ideally keep the bluescreen at a distance from the body where color reflections don’t become an issue.

That is a lot of things to coordinate on top of the typical set of light, make-up, styling, pose, etc. etc. A blue screen seems like a convenient short-cut. But it really isn’t if you do it right. It should be reserved where shooting the scene in real life is either entirely impossible or cost prohibitive.

More to come on this subject…..

 

Quick update to this topic:

Mark Johnson just posted an interesting Photoshop workbench that has techniques around the Photoshop Calculations to actually come up with a better bluescreen mask. I played around with it on my image from above while I was listening to it, and found it to be really helpful. Rather than doing a ‘Select Color’ and then fuzzing around with the various lasso tools to correct the edges, this technique blends various alpha channels to create a new high contrast alpha channel. Creating a selection out of this alpha channel is very quick (use Ctrl-Alt-<channel #>) and you’re done. The biggest advantage other than being faster, is that it does a better job in areas where the selection is graduated. In an alpha channel it’s easy to see these graduations and leave them alone if you want to keep them (such as the shadow area below the back arch in my image).