Welcome to 2010!

Meet Jerry and Jason. These two guys own World Gourmet Marketing and it's Sensible Portions brand. They help me stay busy shooting images for packaging and sports stars. My first two days of bookings for this new year came from them. We shot straight portraits, funny portraits, pallets of products and groups of packaging. I think that images like the one above help show what a great company it really is. They help keep things fun and after all, if it isn't fun, it's not worth doing. Welcome to 2010. We'll see how this year goes. If the first month is an example, we'll be okay.

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!

Anything (almost) for a buck!

When a client calls, the answer is yes. With very few exceptions, that describes my life as a professional photographer. This blog probably shows that I am a primarily studio photographer. My food photography blog shows my studio speciality. But when a food client calls and asks me to shoot an event, I answer yes... and then run around to figure out how to do it. This client hired me to shoot three days of a big corporate meeting last year. I had to learn then how to use an on-camera flash (not even TTL). I ran around and shot tests until I was secure in my new ability. It's funny that with over 30 years in this business, I have never had to shoot one of these things. Well, the 3 days went great. I shot the meetings, gave them jpgs each day for a slide show and even set up a portrait shoot in a hotel room. Since then I have gone back to shooting products and food for this client. Then 2 weeks ago they called again, this time for a sales meeting. My answer was: yes! Especially for my day rate.

I set up my MacBook Pro on a table in the corner and launched Lightroom. Then I switched between 2 cards as I shot, downloading one card to Lightroom while shooting to the other. I was able to equalize all of the images quickly and even ran a slide show of the downloaded images on the laptop as I went back and shot. It was actually fun, made my client happy and made the studio money. 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.

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.

Filling the empty spaces

Boredom: I can't stand it. Maybe it's the ADD or maybe it's just human nature but I dread being bored. I'm not booked on a food packaging job until next Tuesday. I look forward to that job but what am I supposed to do in the meantime? Thank God a FedEx package arrived this morning. It was filled with NUK products for me to shoot. I like photographing NUK products because they handle light well and have lots of small detail that I can obsess over while I light. Most photographers seem to hate simple product shots (compared to the larger packaging type jobs) but I see them as a way to stretch my creative lighting legs on a lowly job, a good way to make money and most of all a way to fill my days between the bigger jobs. For me they are a boredom killer. I will be teaching two classes at William Paterson University this fall. That will help to keep me busy but my favorite boredom killer continues to be these simple product shots.

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.