Photo of shirt with Morie patterns

Every now & then we all have to deal with Morie’ patterns. Usually Morie’ patterns show up in shirts or models apparel & it is due to interference between fabric texture and the grid pattern on the digital camera’s sensor. I have tried several ways of getting rid of Morie pattern & here are two that work.

Photoshop: Method “A”

1. With your image open choose the Eyedropper tool from the photoshop palette & select a color sample of the fabric
2. Select the “Brush” tool from the Photoshop toolbar then change the size of the brush to suit your needs
3. Change the “Mode” from Normal to Color
4. Brush away the Morie
5. You may still have some darker lines within the fabirc but at least the color is gone – you’ll have to clone these darker lines out or leave them alone depending on how they look

Photoshop: Method “B” – A little better on the original color accuracy of the fabric

1. With your image open: Duplicate your Layer
2. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur – adjust this filter to blur just enough to make the Morie’ color go away
3. Go to the History palette > Make a Snapshot – name it Blur
4. Apple – Z to undo the Gaussian Blur from the original photo
5. In the History Pallet: Click just to the right of the “Blur” snapshot to Set the “Source of the History Brush”
6. In the Tool pallet select the History Brush & adjust it to your desire size
7. Change the “Mode” from Normal to “Color”
8. Now simply erase away the Morie pattern – You still may end up with some darker lines from the pattern you may have to clone out

These two methods are the best I have found so far.. If you have another way feel free to comment!

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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.

I have an idea – a messy “Closet” to represent disorganization, confusion, disarray, mess & disorder! Ha! – Now what to do, let’s see… I have a closet, I’ll use that. Mmmm, that carpet will never work, I’ll go to the big box hardware store & get some easy to install flooring I can remove later.  Now props, mmmm, I know the thrift store has lots of cheap items & a great selection of clothes, hats, old radio, old shoes, tennis racquet & the first Monday of each month is 50% off, I’ll do that instead of pulling my wife’s clothes from her closet, trust me, bad idea… Now how about a model, I need someone thin, young & can understand the concept of what I want, hey, how about that art student, she needs some extra cash & will have a understanding of what I’m trying to do. Cool.

OK – you get the idea, use what you have & adapt to it. Find cheap props from yard sales & thrift stores. Lighting, I choose tungsten for this shot, I can control tungsten much better than flash or strobes. Talent, I find students for some of my concepts, they can always use the extra money. Camera, use what you have, I shoot Canon 5D for some shots & my Hasselblad H4 for others. Total time for this shoot was about 10 hours with getting props, flooring retouching & metadata plus cleanup, the shooting was about an hour.

VIDEO > Click Here >Fashion Production

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!

Video > Click Here > Tokyo, Japan Photoshoot – iStockalypse

I was recently invited to shoot with istockphoto in Tokyo, Japan for 12 days – shooting everything from kids playing in the park to board room meetings, what a fantastic trip!  A trip like this takes lots of planning, planning & then more planning. What to bring, should I shoot with my Hasselblad or Canon? Lights? Props? Talents? Locations?

Fortunately for me istockphoto had producers to take care of the models, lights & locations, all I had to do was come up with creative ideas. When planning a trip like this is just like any other shoot, but this time I can’t make mistakes. I’m 6,852 miles from Atlanta where my studio is so I need to plan carefully, my ideas, props to bring, props to get there etc… I brought as many props as I could carry with the extra luggage, a hammock for a family in the park setting, a birdhouse partally put together complete with an pre-sharpen carpenters pencil, good used hammer, a few nails & even some sawdust to sprinkle around, along with some other props.

Shooting with istockphoto on location was a great experience. Meeting lots of other istockphoto photographers as well as istockphoto creatives & staff was a tremendous value as well as making new friends that will last a lifetime. While shooting I would come up with ideas & then make request to production, hey, I need a birthday cake with eight candles, an orange bicycle, then a green water can for a garden shot… all delivered within 30 mins! Getting great photos takes lots of work, planning & support, it’s all a team!

The language was a bit of a problem, we did have language interpreters on hand but sometimes they would be busy helping other people. If I had to do it over again I would make small cards the models could read when I showed them, cards like:  ”go back & please do it again”, “smile”, “Look to the left”, “Look to the right”, “Get closer please”, etc…

Also after 12 days of shooting there are gig’s of  images. I had three backups before 10pm each night. There is a copy on my MacBook, the other two on 500 gigs lacie rugged hard drives. Also… just in case, call me paranoia, but one of the backups I stuck in the fedex box to be delivered to my studio later that week in case there was a loss luggage disaster or accident.

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, Hasselblad,  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 or the Hasselblad 35 to 90mm zoom  – I very rarely use any other lens.

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.

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 your 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.

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 not to have any banding issues.

Making it happen – I usually blow out my skys when I shoot by exposing for the shadows, this most of the time gets me a near white sky. If you do not have a white sky try this method anyway, you may love the results.

• First things first – Apple-J to float your current layer
• Use the Color Range method   >  choose menu > Select > Color Range
• Place the eyedropper in the sky area
• CK: Localize Color Clusters
• Fuzziness is fully adjustable, you’ll have to play with it
• Range: this is your Selection range – remember the worst mistake you can do is to treat this as a Magic Wand too, it’s not, no where near it – the color range tool  selects a specified color or color range within an existing selection or an entire image. The Magic wand tool selects color within the image but leaves a very hard edge.
• Open your Sky image – copy & then Paste the sky image INTO your selected area
• Use your Opacity to adjust
• After pasting your sky into the image use the Elliptical Marquee set to 250 (base on about a 60mb file) & delete the bottom of the sky where your horizon meets the sky if needed.
• That’s it, adjust the sky to your liking using Curves, Hue Saturation etc…

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.

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.