Look out bunnies!

This is the last shot for my table top WPUNJ image. I shoot each image as the students look on so they can then do them for themselves the next week. They learn how to light different things by #1. seeing me shoot them and then #2. shoot them themselves. We'll see how they do next Monday...

Photo retoching

I just finished replacing backgrounds on 101 portraits for many Nestle Power Point presentations. I recognized many as those I have shot but some had trees and buildings behind so I assume they were scanned from prints. The one trouble I had was that they were all tiny 72dpi jpgs. I used Photoshop CS5's quick select tool and refine selection brush. That and an identical gradient made all of the power point images look the same.

I tell my studio lighting students that in 2011 each and every photographer has to know Photoshop so that they can pre-vision a shot and know how Photoshop can help them. I used to shoot Oreo's in ice cream. Oreos demand a certain light and ice cream needs something different, By knowing that one can light the ice cream beautifully and shoot first, then replace the lights for the Oreo and shoot secondly you can have both lit perfectly and put together in one final shot. Remember; you get paid if you light and shoot or retouch. Most of my earning this February has been from retouching. Thank God. Thank Adobe.

Panoramas

This job was nothing but fun. Akiva and I went into NYC yesterday to a Zales jewelry store. It was there that I shot some panoramas of the interior. The image above shows panoramas made in Photoshop. One was shot with a 20mm manual lens on my Nikon D700, the other was shot with a 28-75 AF zoom set to 28mm. There are programs that can take these images and turn them into very cool VR Panoramas for the web. It's all fun and after overlapping the images around 50% as I shot, Photoshop took over and did most of the rest. Here is a hint if anyone wants to try this: Each layer has a mask attached. If a layer is off slightly, unlink the mask and carefully transform the layer into place. Then re-link the mask. That seemed to work perfectly.

Snowboarding with the Nikon D700

My son William has a T-shirt business called Wolves VS Lions. It seems to be doing well.

As I do photography for his company, I am stretched beyond what the studio work I normally do and it helps to broaden my experience and test Nikon's D700 as well.

We did these shots at Mountain Creek in New Jersey. Two young ladies offered to be models and for light on this night shoot, I bought a Brinkmann flood light at Wal*Mart as I drove to the mountain. My son (since he was the client) was in charge of keeping the light on the snowboarders and I set the Nikon to ISO 6400, and continuous high shooting with a 28-300mm auto focus lens. I just focused at the end of the tube and hit the trigger when one of the girls got there and followed them along the very slippery tube.

I was amazed at this little camera. Out of 6GB of images (around 200) I missed focus on only one image! The Nikon followed and continually focused as the camera shot image after image. At ISO 6400 the noise looked like grain (I love grain) and was easily modified in Camera Raw. The battery only went from 100% to 85% even in the very cold weather. I have the MB-10 attached so I think I could have shot for over 4 hours but I got too cold out there.

Well, this photo thing is still fun and I am still learning. I think I prefer the warmth and control of the studio though.....

Photoshop CS5

I was excited to get Photoshop's CS5 Design Premium. Imagine my disappointment when the installed software didn't work. After a few tries I got Photoshop and Dreamweaver to launch but Illustrator and InDesign would just quit. The Adobe web site showed me that others had the problem as well. Why would CS4 work, but not all of CS5? I was anxious to experience Adobe in 64 bit finally. Maybe my older dual core MacBook Pro was too old for this software? Why would some parts work and some parts not? I didn't want to play around in terminal as some suggested. I even made a new admin account but to no avail. Finally I thought... what does Illustrator and InDesign have that Photoshop doesn't depend upon? Why maybe type! I took all of my type except for Arial and put it into the trash for safe keeping. Then I launched InDesign. Wow! It launched! So type was the problem! I slowly moved the type back into the font folder first the A's then the B's. InDesign kept opening until I put the H's back. I just slowly removed each H font until it started again and then I had my culprit. One lousy type font I have never before seen or used hiding amongst the H's! Now everything is working like clockwork. What fun!

Parse3

This one was fun. It is for the company Parse3.

My sons borrowed my Taurus wagon to drive to Illinois for a big concert with 3 additional friends. That meant I had to use William's Escort to go to this shoot. No gurney this time just a car filled with heavy equipment. Thank God my friend Dave (second from the right) had many young interns to help bring all the equipment up the 1 1/2 flights. Anyway, I shot the principles against a white seamless, shot the wall, the table and the pictures. Once home I extracted the people from the seamless and built a 60" file of background and table. Finally I added the people in the proper order, gave them a little shadow and made it exactly the size Dave requested. Soon, it will be a wrap around for the web site. Great fun with great people and now my wagon is back and ready for Wednesday.

Photoshop fun

I've had some time to play lately. There seems to be more time time between jobs than the last few years. This is typical during recessions (this is my third since opening my own business). This time around I have some things to fill my time. This time I am fully digital and have a nice computer and Photoshop to play with. To that end I have been playing with different images from my databank and layering them with different curves and layer blending modes. I think I'm getting close to a nice super contrasty look. It almost looks normal but it's a long way from the start. Photoshop. It helps fill the time with fun!

Guitars

This is one beautiful bass guitar.

It was created by B&G Kaufmann.

The shots I did were for a new web site. My friend Manny Rhinesmith is doing the site so he asked me to do some images of the guitar. Manny is a guy you just have to love, so we spent the afternoon shooting pictures and having fun! One of the great things about photography is having a subject that is just plain beautiful (be it a guitar or a human) and meeting the challenge of lighting it so that it's beauty shows through. I love this shot. Now I wish I could play the bass.....

Spec

What is this?

Is it an illustration or a photograph?

The answer to those questions is: Yes!

Each piece has been individually photographed with the same light. The shadows have been duplicated in Photoshop with paths and each part is indiviually controlled on it’s own layer; even the paperclips. Now the art director can tweek the file to his heart’s content. This kind of digital work can look real when the photographer knows the end result and all of the light matches.

This was a job I did on spec for a friend who has his own design firm. I'll have to wait and see if the company chooses this direction or one of the the others he has presented. Still, it was nothing but fun to make. If they go another way, maybe I'll put it up on Alamy. We'll see.

Pharmaceutical Still-life

Why would a food photographer find himself shooting still-lifes for a pharmaceutical company? In this case there were a number of good reasons.

1) They agreed to my price so I could be a happy shooter.

2) The art director was a friend.

3) Food photographers can shoot everything very well and

4) No one else wanted to book me that day.

We drove out to Pennsylvania in the Taurus with the gurney full of studio equipment. We stayed over night so that we could get an early start the next day and shoot all day in a corporate conference room. We ate well. I have known Clint, my friend from Morgan Design, for many years. We were able to be totally comfortable for the two days that we were together. So there it is: One day + shooting, one day retouching, a happy client and money with a camera. What could be better than that?

Giant billboard from a tiny chip

This is a giant billboard on New Jersey Rt 3 as you are heading East into the Lincoln Tunnel. It's sitting on top of a building and is probably over 50 feet wide. I am putting this up on the blog because I shot the images of the three pro athletes individually with my lowly Fuji S3. I shot the main body portion of the guys first and then their hands with the packaging (which was replaced in Photoshop) separately. I shot the guys with a 10-20mm Sigma lens and their hands with a 28-75 Tamron f2.8 lens. As I said before, it's a 12 mpx Fuji S3. The shots look totally great from street level and being so near the Meadowlands, I'm sure it will do the Sensible Portions company very well. So when someone tells you that you need film or at least a medium format digital back to shoot for a billboard, tell them about me and the huge billboard that I shot with my Fuji S3. This is too much fun!

Retouching

Digital Photographers: Today, you have to become totally comfortable with Photoshop if you are going to make the most money from each job and keep your clients happy. A good knowledge of Photoshop began helping me as soon as this job started. I knew that I had to strip the cakes away from the background so I made sure that if the cake was dark, I had white paper behind it. If the cake was white, I had dark paper behind it. This was all done after I made sure the light was perfect. When I got back from the client's place, I was able to strip a lot of cakes from their background pretty quickly. The plate for all of the cakes was made in Photoshop. I have all kinds of Photoshop plates saved and use them often. I had originally placed a wooden table below the plate. That was the images they saw on the first website. During the second shoot, we photographed different cloths that the client had. I used parts of them to replace the table at the client's request. These went up on the second website. The client's final request was to make the white cloth dark red-ish. I have sent them two different red choices and one has been approved. Now it will be a case of quickly adding the color same layer from file to file. See, the original lighting took around 20 minutes to perfect and gets changed a little from cake to cake. All the rest is added time and money in Photoshop. In the end, the client is happy and so am I. One last note: when the last change is done, I will put up another web site to replace the second one. I can do this so often and easily by using Adobe Lightroom. I just import the images, fill in the appropriate information, hit the Export button and go get coffee! What a wonderful life.

Chef Howie

Yeah, yeah, yeah... It's a food photograph because the client who pays me is a food company and it's people photography because, well, it's a people. See how a food photographer has to know how to do a great job shooting everything? This is chef Howie. He is a great guy and we had a wonderful day. We not only shot pictures like this of him, but also did some beautiful editorial shots for packaging of this companies' crackers topped by chef Howie's recipes. I can't wait to see the packages in the grocery store (I never get tired of that). I used Photoshop's Extract filter (which I have moved from CS3 to the CS4 I use now) to strip out 8 different poses. That's it for this job, I just need to upload the files tomorrow and were done. Now it's on to a day of cakes on Friday. Yeah, I like this life.

Bobby Simmons

Why does a food photographer have to know how to shoot everything well? Why do we have to be Photoshop experts? The reason is that food clients have lots of ways to promote their products beyond food shots and we want to shoot it all (and earn all of the money). This client asked me to go to the Javits Center in NYC and shoot Bobby Simmons as he signed autographs at their booth. My assistant and I went in and spent around 2 hours shooting candids of Bobby.
Then before we left for home, we set up a full length portrait studio in a conference room and shot more formal full length portraits of Bobby for our client. It was a fun day, we got to meet and spend time with the NJ Nets new forward and we kept making money. It's a great life and I feel blessed.

History Channel

This is why I love working on my own. Sometimes things just work out great. I got a late start yesterday after spending about an hour on the phone with my friend Bruce Frazier, another photographer. We had a great time catching up. After the call I got $20.00 cash, air in my tires, and headed down to NYC to shoot for Pearl Media again. On the way I called Josh and it's a good thing because he told me there were 2 different locations to shoot. Since I was heading into the city anyway, I arranged to meet my old friend Mike Harris at ICP to see the Avedon fashion show in NYC. I hit the first location at 5th and 43rd by 12:30 with just a bag full of cameras and began shooting the building piece by piece. The images go around the corner to 43rd street so it took a while to cover the whole thing. I shot a full 2 GB of images so I would have enough pieces to assemble and get rid of most of the people in Photoshop. The top image above is the assembled 5th Avenue side. I hope it looks like one quick shot, but it's really assembled out of over 20 files. By 2:30 PM I was done so I headed over to the ICP at 6th Avenue and 43rd Street, just one block west. It was great walking through the huge exhibit with Michael because he began his career as an art director for such companies as Revlon. That was in the late 60's and early 70's so he actually knew some of the people in the images from those years. I didn't arrive in NYC until the mid 70's (when I assisted Michael) so I missed out on knowing people like Jean Shrimpton. We had a great time. I shot us as we stopped for a nosh, I wasn't even supposed to take a picture there....
After the show I got my car out of hock and dropped Michael off at Penn Station so he could catch a train home. I then drove down to West Broadway just below Spring Street and waited while the guys finished installing the other History Channel building art. When they were done, I shot pretty quickly and was all done by 5PM. When I finally got home I began the Photoshop work of taking all of the disparate pieces and loosely joining them in layers. I have spent today correcting and cleaning up the shots. We'll have to wait to see what the client thinks. All in all it was one beautiful day in NYC.

Product shots keep you busy.

Let's see... feed the family, pay suppliers, have some fun... this is why we trade checks for images that fulfill our client's layouts. This job was for Andy at Gerber. It was a rush job. I had two days to shoot and strip 55 Gerber products and then overnight a Fed Ex envelope so Andy would have the disk in his hands the morning of the third day. Andy did a great job of providing me with an Excel spreadsheet that laid out each shot needed and I kept throwing jpgs at him so he could see if what I was shooting matched what he was thinking. I only had to reshoot two shots and Andy got his disk on time. We call product shots like these our "bread and butter" shots. They can be done well and quickly and can be shot in the dungeon so the expenses are close to zero and everything is profit. We depend upon these kind of jobs to keep all of the bills paid. They are an important part of keeping a commercial photo studio profitable over the long haul. Hey - it's making money with a camera. What could be better than that?

Wide lenses

There is something special about using a wide lens. They don't work for every shot but when they do, they are amazing. Okay here is the truth: The lens I used for this series of pictures (I only show one here) was a Sigma 10-20 mm rectilinear wide angle lens. On my digital camera it acts as a 15-30 mm lens. That's still wide. I originally purchased this lens for a shoot of the Gerber building redesign. I have used it for the Sika antique flooring jobs as well as these Pearl Media jobs. In this shot I wanted to see the big white pointing finger, the general HP signage and the fact that this building is well placed next to the David Letterman Late Show studio. The only way to get it all in is with a very wide lens. Most of the shots for this job were straightened up using free transform in Photoshop. That way we got to see all of the different aspects while having the vertical things vertical. Somehow, I prefer to see it the way it shows above. I've got to say, this lens is super sharp. If you get the chance, try a really wide lens. It adds to the fun!

Lie To Me

It's been a slow start to the year but every job I have done has been tons of fun. This job involved shooting on a cold but clear day in NYC and then a lot of Photoshop back at the studio. I was able to park near the target building at a Muni-Meter on Broadway. I even ate breakfast at the Applejack diner after the shoot while I backed up all of the files to a portable hard drive. The bottom image ended up being one single pan image but is actually built out of 4 different shots. I didn't use Photoshop's photomerge feature, but instead dragged them all into one big (32" wide, 192MB) file. I then used free transform and masks to match and blend the layers into one.
My client had asked me to shoot around 2PM to capture people lined up for the David Letterman Show, but this was a Friday and they don't tape on Fridays. Ah well, I captured as many people as I could and retouched them into some of the shots for the finals. Another happy client and more money for fun. It's still a great life.

Photoshop

I know this looks like an office window. It might (I hope) make a nice background for a corporate portrait. My client at Gerber is hiring me to shoot 2-3 days of portraits. The shot that is 2 entries back was for him too, but required a great deal of stripping and retouching to include an office window background. This image at 5x6 feet will save me a lot of effort and time when shooting many people.
It looks like a real shot, but actually exists nowhere but here. I took a picture of one slat of a small window mini blind. Next I shot an image outside the window of trees and sky. I rotated the mini blind slat 90 degrees, transposed it to fill the image vertically and copied and repeated it across the image. I added some walls above and below the window and soft shadows where the blinds cross the walls, not the window. This image will please a good client. This image will make my life a little easier. This image could never have been created if I wasn't so experienced in Photoshop®. There you have it. To succeed, a photographer needs to expertly control light and focus, and know Photoshop® very well.