In this series I photograph a couple in an old car (due to copyright issues, instead of a new car) in my driveway for a “Road Trip” theme. I first scout for locations to find the best angle & lighting. After taking the main photos of the car & couple I select the edits & then I photograph the locations. I import the edits of the car and models as small low res JPG into CaptureOne software – CaptureOne has a great feature where you can superimpose one photo on top of a new photo which you are currently taking so you can get the “positioning” just right – you then can adjust angles, lights etc..
This technique has some work to do in post production using Photoshop, but I find it more cost effective to strip in the backgrounds in post. I can combine one image in about 1 to 2 hours. How long & how much would it cost me to drive around to different locations with models, stylists etc…? Total shoot time with models on this shoot was 1 hour, location photography was 2 hours not including scouting the day before.
Lighting was Elinchrome 2000 watt strobe in large soft box plus natural light as fill.
What does it takes to produce a fashion shoot. This was a medium size project involving about 17 people including producers, stylists, 3 assistants, 4 cameras & bunches of lights, strobe & continuous lighting. We found a terriffic location with plenty of natural lighting as well as lots of open space complete with kitchen & large cyc wall, Ambient Studios in Atlanta . Eighty thousand dollars for props & wardrobe were also used. We flew the talent in from Italy, California & Idaho. All images & video were shot with the Canon 5D MKll – enjoy!
In quite a few of my photos the sky’s are added in for effect. It’s so tempting to make your selection in the image & use the Gradation Tool with a blue/white, blue/yellow or blue/blue colors to make a sky. Don’t! If you’ve done this before then you already know about the dreaded banding problems. Now you have a lot of work ahead of you using filters Blur, Box Blur & Add Noise to “hopefully” get rid of the banding. Let’s keep it simple, why not add a real sky background?
You are guarantee to have no banding issues. After pasting your sky into the image use the Elliptical Marquee set to 250 to delete the bottom of the sky where your horizon meets the sky if needed. (base on about a 60mb file)
I have a collection of about 100 sky images without clouds shot at different times of day. It’s best to shoot sky’s in a very large open area like at the beach or desert so you can have a the sky go all the way down to the horizon for that natural gradated look.
I love shooting, I love getting my images in the computer & adjusting them, giving them just the right “look” I’m trying to achieve. Now comes the hard part, adding metadata: keywords, description, title, dealing with releases & uploading. Ugh! I found I spent way, way too much time dealing with metadata & uploading.
I cannot tell you how frustrating it is after hours & hours of adding metadata & uploading images only to find out the next morning there was an error in the uploading or the releases did not upload correctly, try again.
Take if from me, look at all the big stock photographers out there, how do you think they got to be so successful? By being a “jack of all trades”, no, they know what they do best & focus their energy on that, shooting. They let others do what they do best, rather its keywording, accounting, or styling. That’s how you grow a business, you cannot be a “jack of all trades” and grow a business.
Well, I’ve got a great accountant & I hire a great stylist as I need one. So I wised up & starting sending my images to LookStat – they add all the metadata, keywords & descriptions. LookStat handles the releases & then uploads the images & releases to my agency, istockphoto. If you use more than one agency they can upload to multiple agencies as well. It’s so easy, I shoot, adjust my images then send the images to LooksStat via ftp. Done.
LookStat is simply an extension of my business, I focus on shooting & they do the rest. Check them out, or better yet try them out – right now you can get a 25 image trial for free, just click on their link to the right of this blog.
I love toys. I rotate most of my equipment every two years due to advances in technology. I have strobes, tungsten’s, daylight balanced fluorescents, small lights, big lights, canons, lots of lenses & too many computers. When looking at my favorites photos the past year I thought about what equipment I used to “get the shot” – it was natural light with a little fill, mmmm, just think of all that money I could have saved. My favorite lens is the Canon zoom 24mm to 70mm F2.8 – most shots with this lens are shot around 35mm to 55mm. I very rarely use any lens over 70mm.
That goes to show “me” – think concept first, production 2nd & equipment 3rd. Most of my best shots are about the concept & idea, not the equipment.
What I love about photography is the constant changing of the technology. I use to shoot film, process it & make prints. Then I moved to shooting transparency, shoot & send the film to the E6 lab. Then I bought an imacom scanner, – scanned my transparency & then into Photoshop. Now Im shooting Video along with stills. This is great, but my biggest setback is coming up with a efficient digital workflow – just ask my assistants, they hate me because they never know what software I’m using, Light Room, Aperture, Bridge, CaptureOne, damn! What about the database, how do I keep track of all those images & video clips.
With all the software to choose from there is simply no one stop shop that works for me. The lesson I’ve learned is this: for now use what works for me & my studio, forget the rest & focus more on creating images that sell. Right now my choice is Light Room for importing, editing, processing & exporting. Extensis Portfolio for keeping track of images & videos. For now…
Strobes or continuous lighting? (tungsten, HMI, LED, flashlight etc…) I personally hate strobes. I prefer tungsten, or any other continuous lighting source. I always start with natural light whenever possible, then add lights from there of course. Try this you strobe shooters, pick up your tungsten light or other continuous lighting source & use that just that for a couple of shoots. Now you can forget the sync speeds, radio slaves, sync cords, flash recycle etc… You can actually “see” what your getting, move around, don’t wait for the strobe to recycle, shoot at 1/2000 sec. if you want. Yea, yea, I know strobes have their keep, but for most of my shoots tungsten or continuous lights are the way to go. You know by now I’m talking about studio & indoors location, for that outdoor portrait shot then a simple fill flash would be the way to go, or even a simple reflector.
