problem solving: light as a maximizer

When commissioned by ad agency Publicis to shoot a print ad series for Oral-B I was immediately captivated by the concept: people in important situations who are distracted by food caught in their teeth. The conceptual humor was right up my ally. I was eager to dig in.

One final photo from the series. "If it's stuck in your teeth, it's stuck in your head."

The art director was concerned that the lighting on the location shot and on the separately-shot food item wouldn't match. Poorly planned lighting would have been a dead giveaway that the image was a composite. At our first pre-production meeting we figured that we could shoot the food in the same light as the location shot: just stick the food in the hospital bassinet, shoot it, and enlarge it for the composite.

This didn't work for a couple of reasons. First, we still weren't sure what food we were going to use as the baby even during the nursery shoot. We were debating BBQ ribs, strawberries, etc... We went with broccoli the day after. So we were going to have to shoot it separately anyway. Second, smaller food items were going to look wrong even if they were in the exact same lighting because they would be enlarged.

*this gets a little complicated after the jump*

improv photo - rubin

When improv comedy duo Ruby Marez and Binu Paulose AKA "Rubin" commissioned a promotional photo for their live performances I got to do something I've wanted to do for awhile. I've "shared" photo information from separates frames before to make a better moment. Sometimes I've composited one person's facial expression from one frame onto another. It's a good skill to have when working with seven or eight-person improv teams who go wild in front of the camera. But, this time I got to plan out frame-by-frame a fully-composited eight-person group photo using only two models and a lot of character.

Thanks Rubin!

the book | see it live and in person

When I set out to make a full-bleed book, mounted and trimmed by hand, I had no idea that it would take so much effort; making sure my prints would line up, carefully making cuts, scoring and folding gently. But the more I put into the project, the more I realized that the custom, one-of-a-kind nature of the book would be strikingly apparent to anyone who viewed it. The process became a weekend-long practice in zen. It's one that I look forward to doing again when the time comes.

geek goddesses lp collector: athens, ga

The first of a couple of Geek Goddesses shoots on the road in Athens, GA went off better than I could have imagined.

Luckily, a good friend of mine Sean Wessling has a killer house AND a killer record collection. We also had an awesome model, Melinda, who had great ideas of her own and lit up when we put on Thunder Road from Springsteen's Born To Run LP.



For this shoot, I really let the location guide the everything else. Sean has great wood paneling and painted wood floors in the record room. He has great taste when it comes to color. I went through his collection and pulled out some iconic rock albums for the display wall. I got rid of his ipod and cd player, pulled out some big speakers and made some stacks of LPs. It hit me pretty early on that this would be a great photo to shoot square. The repeating pattern of the square LPs were perfect and I was able to easily move the stacks around to fill in the dead space. For wardrobe we chose bright yellow and blue to stand out against the muted colors of the room.

We got some great shots early on, but I really wanted Melinda's hair to be flying, so we cranked some Queen and got to work.

GraceNMichelle shoot: post production thoughts

The shoot with vlogger Geek Goddesses GraceNMichelle last week went great. We tweeted about the process as much as we could while staying on track with the limited amount of time that we had. Since we budgeted less than an hour of actual shooting time and two hours for set-up I decided to use set-up time to compose the shot and lock down on a tripod. This way I could composite two shots together, a good shot of Grace and a good shot of Michelle, into one final image.


I picked this one for Michelle's expression.












Then I added Grace from another frame













I did a little bit to soften the fly-away hairs and lines on the faces. I try to be gentle when I'm retouching because I want my subject to look like real people (for the most part).

The fun part is selectively adjusting the contrast and saturation for each part of the photo. Generally, I'm gentle with skin tones, so I can keep a good tonal range. I'm a little bit rougher with clothing, props, and anything else that I really want to pop. I then crop the photo and do a bit of burning around the edges for a vignette.

I may end up taking this photo a little bit further. I'm also considering using a different frame for Grace; which means I'll be starting over for the most part.

holga picture success

It's been a little while, but I finally have a finished Holga photo talked about in a previous post. It's from a shoot I did with Mike Walters of Mystery Circuits.

I LOVE IT! I'm so impressed with the aged photo quality that the plastic lens adds. The mood is exactly right and the camera worked great with my off camera strobes (you can see my blue-gelled background flash behind Mike on top of the TV). I'm so excited about this addition to my camera bag, that I went ahead and added a holga gallery to the main website (even though there's only one picture in the gallery).

I intend to whip out the little red holga whenever I have lights set up. Please hold me to it.

I scanned the 2 1/4" color negative on a flatbed scanner with a negative scan feature. It doesn't give the file size that a dedicated negative scanner would, but it allows me to scan to the edge of the film. That way I can show off the heavy holga vignetting and the nifty fuji data burned in on the edges. Cool.