New Photoshop Video

Here is a little photoshop tutorial about smoothing wrinkled fabric.

Stripe Fall '13

Recently myself and the Stripe team went up the coast a little with some models and assistants to shoot a lookbook of their fall merchandise. It was a fun day packed with a lot of outfits and locations. Although for most of the day we didn't have the fog and cloud cover that I was hoping for we got enough of it for it to work overall. Its always kind of frustrating trying to fight the mid day sun when its just harshly illuminating everything but with some good umbrella placement and awesome assistance I were able to mostly get it looking alright. As usual the shoot day began with makeup:

Anna doing makeup

As you can see in the next photos, the sun was pretty strong and harsh but my 60" Softlighter was able to do double duty and shade/light the models. For times like this it would be best to have a big scrim or a huge umbrella to use for shade but it just isn't at all practical. At least at a location like this with my resources.. Since we were right above the beach there was a little breeze going and any amount of wind turns big light modifiers into sails. Luckily I had some great help on that end and the light was well managed.

Replacing the harsh sunlight with soft light from an Alien Bees B800 and 60" Softlighter.

Moving around some gear

Unedited shot

I often need to place lights pretty close to models and then remove them later in photoshop.

And here are a few of the final images from that location:

I usually mirror the images while working on them in Photoshop and sometimes just leave them that way instead of flipping them back.

After shooting for a while at the lighthouse area we went down the road a little to a kind of marshy area. This was probably my favorite location of the day because the fog rolled in and the light got super soft. It was pretty much perfect. I'm striving to get better at naturally mixing ambient light with the flash and I'm really happy with the look of these shots. Below are some behind the scenes shots of the setup and then the final images:

The light was already so beautiful that it didn't take much from the flash to glue everything together.

My favorite photo from the shoot

This is the kind of look that I wish all my work had. Super soft and subtly controlled light. Maybe I should just go to places like this all the time. Hah!

I didn't take as many behind the scenes photos as I would've liked but here are a few more of the final images from the shoot:

Overall a fun shoot at some beautiful locations.

Penny Rose Summer '13

In late May I shot a series of Oz themed photos for thepennyrose.com

Here's a great behind the scenes video from Deva:

We got to shoot on some beautiful property up in the mountains which was great. It was helpful to have all of the people that we had. There was a shoot assistant and hair was on set all day. Those kinds of things make things a lot nicer. I think most of the photos turned out alright. Some of them are the kinds of things that I'd like to someday revisit with a larger budget to build some bigger sets but for the resources we had available I think we did pretty well. The yellow bricks were pretty fun. They actually aren't bricks at all. 2x4"s cut up into sections and painted yellow. Thought that'd be lighter and cheaper than actual bricks. I love when something so simple can add something really cool looking to a photo.

Below are some more behind the scenes photos followed by some of my favorite final images from the shoot:

Penny Rose Group Portrait

On April 28th I met with the writers of thepennyrose.com to do a portrait for them. The Penny Rose is a fashion/beauty blog based here in Santa Cruz and I have collaborated with them for multiple past and upcoming shoots. Christa Martin and I had discussed the idea of a portrait for a while and ended up doing a sort of Vanity Fair style big group shot of everyone.

Technically it was something kind of new to me since I haven't done many group shots this large but it was a fun challenge and I think for a first attempt it was pretty successful. I generally use pretty soft light in my photos so to get a light source big enough for this many people I clipped together a few sheets of ripstop nylon and hung it on some background stands. A light fired through it was able to roughly approximate a huge softbox. That provided a good amount of light but I still needed more so I used my other flash with my go-to 60" Softlighter. I never get tired of that thing. Great light.

Doing something like this made me realize how much work goes into posing people to look good as a group. At this scale I kind of stopped looking at them as individual people/portraits and more as composition elements that had to be moved around until we got what we wanted. I probably could have kept going and tried to get something better but honestly I'm pretty ok with what we got. It was definitely cool to have gone to the location beforehand and kind of blocked it all out so on the day of the shoot we kind of knew what we were doing.

Anyway, fun shoot and it makes me want to do some more big group stuff. Maybe someday some photos inspired by renaissance paintings with their big groups, beautiful soft light, and mythological themes?

Here are a few behind the scenes photos taken by Mama T:

Feathers, Lace, and Lichen

Recently I'd been wanting to do a really bright "spring" kind of shoot but as happens with many of my ideas it ended up being a little darker than originally intended. One of the things I thought would look pretty interesting is the feathered eyebrows. Anna (Makeup artist, owner of Faust Salon in Scotts Valley) said she hadn't done them before but as usual she was able to make it look great. Hair was done by Paola Corona (Also at Faust).

Once I had the feather/avian/tribal theme roughly worked out I contacted Lammie Young of Blankverse Jewelry and she graciously provided a box of jewelry and accessories for shoot use. Some of the feather items were made just for this shoot.

It's pretty hard to tell but from the final images but we actually were shooting at a grave yard. Since all of the detail of the styling was around her face and torso I mostly just shot close up so the context of the location is pretty much lost. Still though, there was some cool light filtering through the trees so it was worth being there.

I never tire of doing things involving feathers or birds. Both the symbolism and just the overall look of them appeal to me.

Altogether a fun shoot. I always enjoy working with dramatic/exaggerated styling.

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Here's a set of behind the scenes photos taken during hair and makeup at the salon:

Paola Doing Hair

Hair in Progress

Eyebrow Feathers

They actually come still attached to the skin!

Applying Eyebrows

Doing Makeup

The Final Look

And here are some of the final images:

Photographing Brooke above the beach.

Some photos taken by my friend/assistant Austin whilst taking photos of Brooke at a recent shoot:

And yes, hahah.. thats a plastic bag on my lens in the first photo. Purposely softening and creating some cool blurs/flares.

Synergy Organic Clothing Fall '13 Catalog Shoot

Recently I was hired to shoot the studio images and a series of location shots for Synergy Organic Clothing's fall '13 catalog and website. After a long few months of planning and synchronizing the schedules of all those involved (all helpfully kept flowing by Christa Martin of The Penny Rose) we shot for 10 days. First at a warehouse and then on the streets here in Santa Cruz. The images are mostly (as of this writing) not on their website since their fall line doesn't come out for some months from now but they may have one or two floating around. During the shoot I tried to grab a few behind the scenes shots. I didn't get as many as I probably could/should have but here are some of the ones I do have:

An end of day photo of our team for one of our featured look days. From right to left: Myself, Cat (Assistance), Coco (Model), Gina (Assistance), Missy (Styling), and Christa (Producer). Thanks to Laamie Young for the photo.

And here are a couple of the final images taken in front of the chicken coop we are standing in front of in the group shot above.

Here are a couple photos of Myself and Christa setting up for some shots at a local yoga studio.

And here are 2 of the final images from that location.

Here, our production assistants Gina and Cat have some fun with the 3D glasses at the theater we shot in.

And these are a couple of of the final images from the theater.

This is a pretty cool photo of the team setting up in front of a local cupcake shop.

We had a great makeup artist, Anna Wu, working with us for the whole shoot. In these snapshots she is working on Alyssa for one of the featured look days.

Here's an example of Anna's great makeup work from one of our studio days.

And here are 3 more final images from various days that I think turned out pretty well.

September Shoot with Cierra

I want to start getting more videos of shoots (and since my new camera can record video it should be easier). I wasn't really thinking about it during this shoot so I didn't get much but it is the first of what will hopefully be some rapidly improving videos of shoots.