One Pretty Dodge

You have to admit, this is one beautiful car. I'm trying to loosen up my car photography. I want the images to look great, but real. I am best known for food and fashion but when the job to shoot a car comes in, I want to be ready and keeping up to date is important. I can still shoot cars in a studio with perfect highlights, but I am enjoying this looser style. 

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.....

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?

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.