Ok I spent my “compile” time writing this so Ill end it with some photos I took last weekend. My friend Adrienne needed photos for an ad going into a local magazine and needed a real fast turn around. I accepted the challenge and took the photos on Saturday and delivered them on Sunday. It was difficult because of the background. Everything is real, but I did an overlay of a pattern on the red background I had behind it and straightened out the seam between the wood floor and “wall” If I get some time Ill post some “before” shots. I did these in a small dance studio and borrowed some curtains to give it a stage look. The wood floor was too pale so I darkened it up as well, but other than that I built the set and whats there is in the photo.

Our friend Kayla is trying out for one of Colorado’s sports teams ( ok I am not sure which team or what she is trying out for…cheerleader? Sorry I don’t retrain much when people are talking while Im prepping for shots haha ) and asked if I would take some quick shots of her. I thought “how hard could that be?”. Sadly it was tougher than charging the batteries, slapping on a lens and polorizer and walking around the neighborhood and snap some shots. She wanted something a little more edgy than a straight shot and it seemed every shot I took around the house was too “senior portrait” looking, so Marguerite suggested I actually set up some lights and shoot in her dance studio. Is a converted TuffShed that she uses for teaching dance. It has high ceilings and is wide enough for some side lights and can even fit my boom arm and giant softbox that I love to use soo much. I did a shoot for Marguerite a while back ( still in post ) and used some sheets of plastic I bought at Home Depot to shoot lights through. It has a cool effect and it was just lying around so we set it up to use as a simple backdrop.

the simple backdrop used for this session

The lighting was straight forward. I had 2 set up high on either side of the model behind the sheets. I metered them to around F11 ( probably a bit lower after all was said and done ). I then threw in the key light in above and camera left with a beauty dish. That was about F8.3 or so. I cheated and chimped a bit. I hate doing that, but I was in a hurry.

Adjusting the Alien Bee 800 with beauty dish

All lights were fired by pocketwizards. I have not looked at camera gear in a while since I decided to start doing more film projects, but I took a look at the latest pocketwizards and I may have to grab a couple. I have a broken one and I’d love to be able to do some TTL like I have been lucky enough to do with my Nikon D300. The Nikon CLS system is awesome for small lights on location and I think it’d be cool to do that with the Canon…I guess Ill see if it works as well.

Other than that, it was just a matter of firing away. Since it was just in the backyard, we loaded the shots right away and picked the ones we wanted. I did some simple adjustments in Lightroom and voila. Thanks for reading

There are soo many people trying to make a business of photography that just plain suck. There I said it. All they focus on is the money and the easiest way to make a picture that will give them more bang for the buck. I hate being associated with this group and even get to a point where I am embarrassed to even say I am a photographer. I feel the growing crop of “shooters” look for shortcuts, plugins, and easy tutorials to make their work better rather than take the time and energy to actually learn anything of value.
(I totally wrote a giant rant here, but decided to delete it. It was not the driving force of this post)

I acknowledge the fact that there are amazing photographers and I appreciate them and respect them. I don’t feel the world is 100% point and shooters. I am not bashing everyone nor do I care anymore. My point here is I am stepping out of the Thunderdome and taking my name out of the hat. When someone is looking for a photographer to enhance their model mayhem profile, they will no longer have me as an option. I don’t want to shoot another band where they all line up with their hands in their pockets. Finally, I no longer want to spend hour on hours thinking of sets and colors and locations and working on blemishes only to have some shallow stuck up, worst-model-ever-but-thinks-she-is-one-because-her-boyfriend-is-kissing-her-ass say she is too fat in a photo and if I could spend even more time shrinking down a half ounce of normal healthy skin.

I’m out. I may change my mind later, who knows, but the little money I make is soo not worth it and is not fulfilling the needs I have as an artist and the reason I picked up a camera in the first place. I will pay people if I must to be in my work so I am no longer a slave to their opinions and thoughts. I will do what I want and perhaps heal my soul from what this path has damaged.

With all that said, I still have amazing and talented friends that I am sure I will still help and collaborate with. I have met some great people through this craft and will continue to work with them as I still get a joy out of helping them visualize their ideas. If I get a call or an email from someone who still wishes to work with me even after reading this, I will hear them out. Perhaps there are still people out there who would like to get what I have to offer, but to those people who visit my work and think Im going to give them something that doesn’t represent me, I will just politely send them off to the pool of other talent out there.

One of the actors in my upcoming video is a go-go dancer who flies across the country strutting his stuff in various clubs and events. After a shoot for the video, we got to talking and he mentioned a desire to do a series that showcases the sights he has seen and that paths he has gone down or has seen others go down. I was very interested in this series and agreed to do this. First up was a scene involving a theme of “heroin chic”. Not a autobiographical image, but he has seen many people go down the dark paths and wanted to show it off in this series.

For this shoot, I decided to use the small bathroom at the studio. It is very textured and unique and we both felt was a great backdrop for his vision. The biggest concern I had was it was a small space and having to light it in a dark way ( yes that is a contradictory term ) would be difficult. I could do it, but it is a bathroom that is shared across tenants. I didn’t want to monopolize the space in case an overworked artist, full of coffee or “other” liquid needed the space. I had to be in and out without throwing all my equipment in the bathroom. Truth be known, I was worried that someone would pee on it. There I said it.

For the shoot I used a couple of my go to low tech options. 2 fluorescent light strips. I wanted a gritty look so I was not worried about the grain of high ISO. In fact the high ISO produced a grain that I was happy with and added to the feel of the shot. There was a frosted window in the bathroom, but the light was coming in strong so I used 2 fluorescent lights for fill and the main light. Another fun aspect of this bathroom is it has a hot water heater in front of the toilet so I taped the lights to it. I then had all the money thrown around and went to shooting.

Because this is one in a series, I only needed one or two shots. I tried various angles from different perspectives, but the final one was the low to the ground. I tried shooting above ( I never like that angle but I thought I’d try it ), one from far away, and some other angles, but, as I always say, the best shot was the one that was most difficult to get. I got on the ground, trying not to think about all the misfires that a mens bathroom could be the victim of, as well as someone in need of the bathroom coming up and seeing a man lying next to the toilet surrounded by cash and an almost empty bottle of liquor. I shot a bunch of frames, but overall this shoot went really fast. I think the make up and shoot were around an hour or so.

(cue batman spinning logo)

Back at HQ, I loaded the photos up in Lightroom and went through the usual process of removing the bad, out of focus, whoops forgot to move that trash out of the shot, missing limbs, and just ones that looked bad out. I got down to about 10 that I felt were candidates. The great thing I like about Lightroom is how fast I can get down to that final stage and once there I can fiddle with exposure, crop, apply treatments all to one photo and basically copy and paste the rest of the photos and be done. This set required more work than Lightroom has tools for so I did the final treatment and “cosmetics” in Photoshop. This is suppose to be a dark look into the life of a male go-go dancer and the raw shots were too light. The porcelain was too white and the overall image was just not dark enough. I spent some time playing with curves, color filters, and other adjustments, but came down to a simple greenish gradient ( I used the color of the bills as a source color ) and some vignette. I thought the money played an important role in this image so I wanted to apply a tint that reflected that.

After a few exchanges with Cisco, I got down to the final image. I am happy with how it came out and hope he is too. Thanks for reading. hit me up with any questions or comments.

Mel

There are various reasons for bands to approach me, but when they come back for more, I am very honored and happy to take on the challenge. Red Tide Rising had a change in members so I had to take some new photos for them. The biggest challenge I have as a photographer is trying to do something different and yet still good for album covers, promotional material, etc. I am pretty lucky with the people I work with in that they tend to give me free reign on the concept. I have not totally taken advantage of that, but I like coming up with different ideas that will make the hands in pocket look stand out.

A great group of folks and had me laughing pretty hard several times and the Harry Potter song will forever be stuck in my head. Check these guys out immediately.

A sample of the photos uploaded to the Promotional Work gallery.

Look and Feel

I created all the imagery in photoshop. I designed the header and found a font that I liked. The typography is not based on images, but the @font-face feature. I didn’t have to do image replacement and my assumption was that IE6 was dead so I could embed fonts into the page and most my audience would see it. The footer was simple and and gave access to all my social media pages. Nothing exciting, but I like the common components available to me. Create the footer in one place and Im golden.

Main()

The front page was a simple scribble on a piece of paper that I had. Each section had to be customizable and updatable on the fly. The “In a Nutshell” is actually a private post that I inserted in via PHP so that if I want to change it, I just go in and change the header and/or the content. The news section is another custom written piece that pulls all the news posts. The updates to the gallery are all custom fields that I can change at any time and add to if I want. Again very easy and fast.

Turn the Page

All the pages are a custom template. I want all pages to have the same look, but have as much space for content. I removed the sidebar from it so it didn’t look like a WordPress blog.

Oh and the Portfolio

I used the NextGen plugin for the portfolio section. They make it pretty easy to set up galleries and albums and add them to the page. My first draft was actually pulling images from Flickr, but I don’t need to be hindered by that site. I grow tired of that stupid site and it provides no usefulness to me other than people stealing my images. I actually had to hide some images from it because they were being stolen so much. I may just delete the account.

Whats Next?

I was spending way too much time getting this site up and I already have several other sites to build for people so I feel this site is incomplete. I think the blog section is still too monochromatic and needs more pizzazz. Ill come back to it and the nice thing is, I have it all done in CSS so changing things up is easy as taking pictures on P mode….or something.

I am open to feedback and critiques on this site ( if it helps make the site better of course ). I don’t do web design for a living so it doesn’t hurt my feelings to have someone tell me its not the best.I am planning to update this site more and create more content. I have some good projects coming up and I’d like to share it with everyone. Stay tuned…

I just bought a new lens, a Canon 50mm 1.4, which worked really great and produced a fantastic image that was sharp. Its main purpose was for shooting motion pictures ( I still can’t call it film for some reason ), but I have more photo opportunities than “film”.

One area that I am still feeling is a void is a good hair person. I have a great make up artist, but having a hair stylist would really round out my crew. Photoshopping stray hairs is a pain and I think the final result would be even better if I had access to a good hair stylist. I think that will be my next search so if anyone has a good recommendation, hit me up in the comments and help promote them.

Its been said soo many times, but there are always people coming into photography that have yet to hear it. I’ve seen videos over at fstopper showing how a cell phone can create professional results. I get asked about lenses and lights and triggers all the time and I tell them that yes I do shoot with Alienbees and pocket wizards and giant softboxes, but I started off with 1 light and an umbrella just like everyone else. This week I will go over even more lighting hacks that have worked for me so well.

The Late Show
My friend from Arizona, whom I’ve worked with several times before, was in town and of course we had to get together to work something out. I had a short window to work with her and with my latest schedule trying to sell my house, keeping the other business afloat, and a million other issues arising in this so call life, I didn’t have much thought into what I wanted to do with her. My girlfriend, Marguerite always wanted to do something where we sewed someones eyes and mouth shut. I had a really great idea for that concept, but the location I wanted to use for it ( a Public Storage building ) went away….ok I stopped paying for it…. and I didn’t know where else to do it. I still want to do the idea, but well we just decided to do something with it this night. I was not really sure what my idea would be, but Jen told me she was bringing her violin with her so I thought it would be interesting to have a violin player that was blind and mute. Ok well I decided it that day so I was really pushing for a concept that would make this late night worth it. We started around 11:30pm. We were tired from a long day, but we were determined to get something.

Shut Up and Don’t Listen to Me

I had spent an hour lighting up a piece of the studio that I have not used before. In my head I was placing lights and adding gels to try and get an underground sewer/catacomb feel. I had all the lights and modifiers in the world at my disposal, but I lacked the energy and time to have it all figured out by the time my model arrived and make up was only going to be 30 minutes. On top of all that, my favorite modifier would not fit in the space I was lighting. The ceilings are too low for it, which really pisses me off, but I deal. I was going to light her with it, but then decided I could just go for the stand by of using a beauty dish. The issue I have with the beauty dish is that it does not light full body shots as well as I like, especially the angles and distances I use. I kept lighting different areas of the scene and adding colors, but in the end I could not get my model lit to match the vision in my head. I spent a lot of time and showed up early to get this idea figured out, but in the end, time, and lack of thought time beat me. We tried a couple shots with the final light set up, but I was just not liking it.

Less is More
Here is where my point gets driven home. My first shoot with Jen was at another studio and I had the same problem. I was working with Jason to get the back of the studio lit, but I was just not happy. I remembered that moment and decided to try it again. It was a simple shop light attached to a human light stand/MUA/tired girlfriend.

I had her hold the light in the angles and distances that I wanted and just went to town. Jen could not see or talk, so I just had her play. She is really good at doing her part as a model so I let her do her thing. I don’t have to micromanage her at all. In the end the best shots were made with a simple light that anyone can buy and use.

Soo…
I hope this story inspires you and helps you overcome the idea that you need a ton of fancy equipment to get good results. When I was part of the Colorado Strobist group, I brought in 2 of these lights and hung them ( very poorly I might add ) from some light stands and did some portrait shots with them. The catch lights in the subjects eyes are cool and give them almost a cat light look…..ok maybe not the best for traditional shots, but if you have a friend, or at least someone who lost a bet, have them play human light stand and try out some fun stuff. To me, getting a shot technically correct is always a great achievement, but whats more important is that you do something that makes you happy and represents what you are trying to accomplish as a photographer. Trust me, trying to take photos to please everyone else will only make you miserable and want to quit ( or maybe take up drinking ).

Here is the complete set of the series of this impromptu shoot. A little time, some make up and some hair spray is all we really had

[Show as slideshow]

I share a studio space with my friend and fellow photographer, Jason Paul Roberts who does really great work with musicians all the time. I got asked if I wanted to shoot a band because his schedule just couldn’t line up with the deadline they had. I agreed to work with this band and was contacted by Christian the same day. The band Destino Musical needed some shots fast and was wondering if I could “chroma key”. I have not done any green screen work, but have done plenty of shots where I blew out the background in order to isolate the subject. In my paranoid brain, I took his request literally so I headed over to Denver Pro Photo and bought some green seamless and headed to the studio to test out the background.

Green Blood

Jason and I set up a section of the studio for seamless backdrops so I installed the green roll and placed our trusty test subject, Head ( with hair down to see if I can erase the background through strands of hair ) front and center. I typically go for a F8 exposure of the subject and lit the background ( not perfectly ) about the same. This was just a test shot so I didn’t spend too much time getting exposure right.

Photoshopping the background was easy enough using the Color Range too from the Select menu. I didn’t have much knowledge of the group I was shooting and I didn’t really warn them that with a chroma key shot, they had to make sure the colors they wore would not conflict with the background or all hope is lost. I had my laptop with me and loaded some sample shots in and one thing I noticed was the color bleed onto my jeans.

This was not looking great for what Christian was asking for, but the main goal of chroma key is to easily remove the background from the subject and be able to replace it with something else ( usually done in film ). The studio was very hot and it was getting late so I went home to think about what I wanted to do. I had to deliver a product, but I went with my experience and instincts and came back the next day.

The Shot According to Zack

It was very hot in that studio. Running around getting everything in place just to get a simple background type of shot is more difficult than it sounds. Ladders, gaffers tape, a towel, and a new Canon 5D Mark II that has never been used in a photo shoot ( I bought it for film making ). Anyway, I decided to use a set up that I read about a couple years ago from the blog of Zack Arias. I thought it was a very simple yet effective set up and I have used it for a couple of situations in the past. The theory is to light the subject separately from the background.

The set up is not complex. The most difficult part was getting the giant soft box lifted up and positioned. Because of the low ceilings, I was not able to lift it as high as I normally would, but this worked out. As you can see in the first photo, the floor is actually raised up. The advantage here is I can stand on the lower area and shoot from below. With the giant softbox so low, it really made a difference. I set up the giant softbox using a portable background rig and a super clamp. The AB400 was used because I needed less power to light the subject than the background. I was aiming for F8 for the subject, which means the background had to be around F11.5. I have the viewfinder on my camera set to show the blown sections of the photo for a reference of how well I lit the background.

I need to PP

The shoot went well. If I could go through it again, I wish I would have used smaller marks for the band members to stand on. I went through a lot of photos removing it in Lightroom and I also wish I could have had them wipe their feet more. There were 6 people to shoot and I had to talk to all of them, coordinate who was going next, etc. There were a lot of people to pay attention to and I just needed to slow down. Lesson for the kids out there. The more perfect you get your shot in camera, the less work you do. I shoot raw, so my color balance is set to flash, but I use a SpyderCube at the beginning of each shoot to make sure I get the color of the light as well as any bounce from the colors of the wall.

The beauty of the lighting set up is that the background is blown out, which makes it easier to extract the subject. My Lightroom workflow goes something like this:

1) reject – remove all the bad shots ( yes there are a few )
2) narrow down shots to Final ( 5 stars )
Possible replacements ( 4 stars ) and
If-All-Else-Fails ( 3 stars )
3) sometimes I color code groups ( each band member gets a color for example )
4) Filter the starred shots and crop
5) I go back to the SpyderCube test shot, grab the color balance and apply to the first shot. Then I set up my color palette. For this shot, I went through each member, did some exposure changes and sync’d the rest. In other types of shoots, I will play around with my color treatment and when its set, Ill sync all photos
6) spot removal
(sometimes 5 and 6 are interchanged)
7) Things needed in Photoshop are then done here.

I opened up the final shots in Photoshop and just selected the blown out areas and inverted to get the subject. I made an empty file to place all the extracted members and just moved them around until I got the shot at the top of the post. The group shot was just a composite of all the individuals placed together.

The shoot was a success and after all the prep and worry, I felt it turned out well for what they were asking for. Here are some samples from the shoot. If you have any questions about any of the processes, throw a comment down.