CREATIVE52 Project – A New Photo and Story Each Week

Week 1: Create an Image Based On a Single Color

3/22/2021

Week 1: Balloon Shadow on Stairs
Project: Create an image based on a single color

Many photographers just starting out have embraced challenges like the 365 challenge where you post a new photo every single day. That, to me, seems a bit out of my reach at this point. So, I decided to tackle something a bit more manageable right now: the Creative52 Project.

Started by Lindsay Adler from her book “Creative52: Weekly Projects to Invigorate Your Photography Portfolio,” it challenges the photographer to tackle a theme every week. A weekly project allows me time to think of something a bit outside the box, develop a plan, take the photo, edit it the way I want, and take a day or so to reflect on whether or not it’s actually finished.

The first project in the series says to “Create an image based on a single color.” It offers up an example of a man covered in red holi powder. I almost did the same type of image seeing as how I have an abundance of holi powder to choose from. But I wanted to do something a bit different.

I noticed the stairs at work were refinished, the rubber grips had been removed to expose the concrete underneath. They then stained the concrete which brought out all the creases and imperfections in each step. I took a photo of this from up above an had to edit it quite a bit to get the wall color to match the steps. I wanted the idea of it to be a question of whether or not you were going to be ascending or descending. As a person who considers himself to be an Objectivist, I obviously wanted to be ascending out of the darkness. Well, how do you illustrate this? Photoshopping a bird over the stairs is a bit too easy and cliche. Photographing a person walking up is a bit on the nose. But then I thought about the theme’s challenge: base it around a central color.

With that in mind I decided I wanted to put the shadow of a balloon above the stairs. Balloons are slightly transparent and when light shines through them you not only get a shadow but a bit of light spill coloring the shadow as well.

Creating a shadow of a balloon is easy but the challenge now was to figure out how to warp the balloon to adhere to the angles of the stairs.

To do this I used a feature in Photoshop called “vanishing point” where you map out a 3D representation of the stairs. using this 3D map, you can paste in your image on top of the 3D model and the image will correspond to the angles you’ve laid out.

The problem with this was that it made my Photoshop crash about 20 times. Sometimes new Photoshop updates create problems with some of its features. Hopefully, they’ll address this issue. To get around this little problem I had to do a stamp visible layer of what I was working on, export it as a new document, do the 3D work on that, paste in the balloon’s shadow, get it looking right, then export that on top of my actual working document. By doing all that, the balloon and its string curved and angled in accordance to the steps.
But there you have it, a green set of stairs with the shadow of a green balloon casting a slight greenish light below.

Week 2: Create a Portrait of Someone Without Showing the Face

3/28/2021

creative52 week 2 — Week 2: Books Portrait
Project: Create a Portrait of Someone Without Showing the Face

Week 2 is about “creating a portrait of someone without showing the face.” So, basically, capture what someone is about without having to rely on their expression, image, facial expression, or what is commonly regarded as their appearance. Some examples of this could possibly be Mikhail Baryshnikov in mid spin, a picture of Dwayne Johnson from behind with his recognizable tattoo showing, things like that. You get that idea.

So, yes, it’s a bit of a cliche to hold up the work of others as a representation of an individual. But, it’s a cliche because people understand it well. We’re all drawn to the things we feel best represents us. In regards to books, we often hold the work by other people in such high esteem because they can expertly articulate abstract ideas in ways others would struggle. In this self-portrait, I’m holding a load of books that I feel are particularly representative of me.

I was initially drawn to the work of Ayn Rand after a friend of mine heard some ideas, arguments, and opinions I was making and said, “you should probably read Ayn Rand. You’d probably like her.” And indeed I did.

Ayn Rand is a controversial figure mainly because people who have never read her simply repeat the opinions on her by other people who also haven’t read her. In her own words, “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” I encourage you to read her for yourself. I had some prejudice on her before reading her books but after I read them I realized most people didn’t know what they were talking about or were just lying.

Aside from that, you’ll probably notice that I’ve got some thick books like Infinite Jest, War & Peace, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Les Miserables. There was a time when I wanted to tackle all of the longest novels written in the English language. These are a few of those books. However, David Foster Wallace is something different. I’ve read Infinite Jest twice now. The first time I read it, I read it on more of a technical appraisal. I really wanted to concentrate on how the book was written, the grammatical mechanics, the structure, and how difficult he made it to digest. The second time was mainly to focus on the actual story. I’ve always been quite fascinated with language and how so many authors will distort the rules of grammar to craft their own unique voice in prose.

I used to have a huge hardcover book collection. I would usually tear through a book in about a week and typically never take longer than a month to read a book. This also went for the mammoth books like War & Peace as well (though sometimes a book would take me several months to read, i.e. the Bible). Unfortunately, there was a huge flood in my city back in 2016 and I lost a large number of my books.

When I fled my house from the flood I took three books with me that I knew I wanted to preserve at all costs: my signed copy of Flim Flam by James Randi, my first edition copy of Infinite Jest, and my 1943 copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (not a first edition but published the same year as the first edition).

The pages thrown in the air are from an issue of Southern Skies magazine. It’s a planetarium publication that is issued to people belonging to the Southeastern Planetarium Association, which I belong to. Tearing up the pages is nothing personal, I just wanted some pages blowing around in the air and it was one issue I had on hand. I like SEPA and I like the magazine, it’s just that I wanted some pages blowing around while taking the photo and I thought the pages might come out looking nice seeing as how planetarium work is a big part of my life. My apologies to SEPA, I needed some loose pieces of paper blowing around and that’s what I had on hand.

The last aspect of this image I want to talk about is how I’m not wearing pants. This was something I started to do while on tour with Cirque Dreams. Before every show I would have someone take my picture on stage, in front of the theater showing all the seats, with my pants down. I then started doing this in most group shots. I’m not sure why. I just started doing it, and it stuck. I think it’s funny. Relax.

The creation of the image was kinda tricky. I wanted a stack of books but I knew they were going to be far too heavy to carry while trying to pose for a photo. So, i got a table and put four fuses down that I knew would be sturdy enough to hold up the books. I just happen to find some flat-bottomed fuses, so that’s what I went with. I knew they’d be easy to Photoshop out.

The scene was crafted with a Godox softbox to my left and a fill light to the right. I knew I was going to cut myself out and place in a different background, hence the black backdrop which I knew would leave a bad color cast on me. After the main shot I put the camera in interval mode and took lots and lots of photos of me throwing papers into the air. I then had to take a plate shot of me acting like I was holding the books so I could use it while cutting out the fuse pedestals, and I had to take a shot without the table so I could cut out my legs.

About to play the Fargodome. We’re
gonna knock their socks off…and pants.

I hope you enjoyed my Week 2 challenge.

Week 3: Tell a Story

4/5/2021

Week 3: Dear John/Jane
Project: Tell a Story

Week 3 deals with telling a story with a single photo. There are many ways to convey a story and the cliche of “every picture is worth a thousand words” is taken to task here. It’s more than just showing a pretty picture with interesting things to look at. How do you get across a thousand words with a specific idea in mind?

I think it would go against the challenge to explain the photo. To me it’s fairly self-explanatory, dealing with common themes of alcohol, an old wedding band on top of a letter, and a person with their head down on the counter.

To capture this image I made a few calls to shoot inside a local bar. No one returned my calls. As a backup plan, I constructed a bar in my house. I used a snoot to shoot light through the whiskey decanter to get those really nice colored strands of light being cast on the center of interest. For the bottles beyond, I used a larger LED light dialed down a considerable amount to not drown out the amber light being cast through the whiskey. In order to not blow out the highlights and to have as much information to push and pull in post-production, I shot this bracketed. This was 7 shots blended together to really capture the subtle rays of light, the colored lights on the bottles, as well as great shadow detail.

I actually had a second picture I considered for this challenge as well. I always liked the shot of someone putting on makeup in the mirror. Not just a woman putting on her daily makeup, but more of a performer putting on makeup. I used to tour with a cirque company and had to briefly wear makeup at a time. Every night before a show we would all be in the dressing room putting on our cirque-style makeup.

My girlfriend filmed a video to the Satyricon song “K.I.N.G.” and made herself up in some quasi-Black Metal facepaint. I saw her taking the makeup off and thought it looked interesting so I snapped this shot.

A shot like this dispels the mystique of the performer. It shows them putting on or taking off their stage persona. It’s a scene that the public rarely sees unless specifically invited.

Ultimately, I decided on the wedding band shot to represent my “Tell a Story” as I think it’s more dramatic and immediately understood without having to know some context.

Week 4: Using Negative Space

4/12/2021

Week 4: Ten Minutes to Showtime
Project: Using Negative Space

Creative52, Week 4 is all about negative space. The negative space in the photo should complement the image or be the dominant element in the frame. This could be the contrasting color of the background bringing out the shape and color of the subject, a wide open sky to show the vastness of the horizon, a silhouette framing a person.

I toyed around with this idea for a little while and came up with a few options: I thought about a person casting a long shadow on the street; I thought about taking a photo of my girlfriend in the frame of a door and expanding the door frame out to be much larger; ultimately, I wanted to get a bit more personal with the image and show something from my recent past.

When I was with Cirque Dreams, we played in many theaters that typically housed Broadway-style shows: a large stage for a full play with many actors and a huge set of curtains to block out the entire stage view. Cirque Dreams was a Euro-style cirque show with a modest-sized cast of circus performers that did their acts in front of a live rock band (which was what I was part of).

Performing with Cirque Dreams taught me a lot about that particular performance art lifestyle–the traveling theater troupe thing. We got to the venue early to do tech rehearsal and lighting and we were to start getting ready about an hour before the show in our dressing rooms. As we were putting our cirque makeup on, we would occasionally get stage call updates. “Ten minutes,” the stage manager would say. When we heard that we were all supposed to say, “Thank you, ten minutes,” to acknowledge that we heard her. I thought it was weird to refer to the stage manager in this fashion, to call her “ten minutes” or to call back “five minutes” as if it were a person. But when 15 to 10 minutes struck we were supposed to be back out there on stage and ready to go.

What was cool was that we were all on stage and the audience was all out there and ready to go but we were divided by a curtain. The audience didn’t know what was happening on our side of the curtain, and we didn’t know what their general vibe was on their side of the curtain. They wanted a kickass show and we were ready to put on a kickass show.

Many performers put down Yoga mats to stretch. Many of us would just walk around and chat. I, on the other hand, and the rest of the musicians would warm up a bit. I would stretch my hands for a long time and do a series of fretboard warm-ups.

This image here is me kind of bringing the backstage routine into the front of the curtain. It’s ten minutes before the show and we’re all waiting around just like the audience. We’re just divided by a long, long couple of big pieces of fabric. But when those curtains separate you better believe that we’re all ready to go. I feel that the expanse and length of the curtain that hangs between the stage and audience wraps up the size and scope of the theater show as well.

My hands are extremely important to me. My hands translate what’s in my head into the physical world. In this image they’re clasped together, waiting, in-between curtains. The fingers are waiting to separate just like the curtains are waiting to separate. The hands have the potential to deliver a huge show just like the curtains have the potential to reveal a huge show. Finally, I wanted to make a very exaggerated frame, a very odd aspect ratio to accentuate the length of the curtains. The original, non-Instagram final image is 13996×5543 pixels.

Week 5: Create a Symmetrical Image

4/19/2021

creative52, creative 52, week 5, symmety — Week 5: Sunday Funday
Project: Create a Symmetrical Image

I’m fairly obsessed with symmetry. I’d say pretty much to a fault.

What is it about symmetry that is so pleasing? It’s kind of like how a melody resolves in music. It’s pleasing because your brain was expecting a resolution and it happened. When you see symmetry in photography it’s comforting in resolution: The sides meet up, the lines converge, there’s balance.

I’m often apprehensive about using the ole Rule of Thirds because I don’t like my subject being thrown off to the side. But there’s the belief–and rightfully so–that symmetry is beautiful, especially in regard to the face.

When this week’s challenge came up I wanted to find something out in the world that was symmetrical but also avoid using the face as my subject. I also didn’t want to find something interesting and just mirror the image left and right. I thought that would be cheating. Instead, I wanted to find something that was already symmetrical and play it up a bit more in post-processing.

On my way to lunch, I walked past this beautiful church called St. Joseph’s Cathedral and I noticed how the front facade was almost mirror image identical to either side of the front door. The sky was particularly clear as well.
So, it became my take on Symmetry for this week.

I really wanted to add a single balloon being held in the hand of the baby statue to get across that the balloons above were possibly let go by the same baby in the statue. Hopefully, if people look close enough they’ll fill in the blanks and come to that conclusion. I also wanted to change the color of the balloons to compliment the color of the sky but I just felt that the blue of the balloons and the blue of the sky just worked so well together. I sat on this picture for a couple of days, turning my monitor on to look at it, walking away to give my eyes a rest, coming back to it to make sure I liked it. Ultimately I’m very happy with it and it’s one of my favorite images I’ve taken so far even outside of this 52 week challenge.

Week 6: Go To a Museum

4/26/2021

This week’s Creative52 challenge is called “Go to a Museum,” and lucky for me, I work in a museum. That being said, the photographer is tasked to go to a museum and absorb all the artwork. After walking around, and at the end of your tour, ask yourself what images really stuck in your mind. Which images made an impression? Was anything particularly inspiring?

Ultimately, this deals with eliciting new stimuli and getting out of the box, so to speak.

One of the images in my museum tour that stuck with me was a photograph by Julia Sims called “Cypress Sunbeam.” When I saw this, I thought it was interesting that the cypress trees were in silhouette with the sky. It also struck me as a very “Louisiana” photograph. When I saw it, I immediately knew it was captured in Louisiana. So, I wanted to do something similar and I asked myself what was it about this particular Cypress Sunbeam photo that garnered it to be part of a museum exhibition.

After all, one day I’d like to have one of my photos displayed in a museum as well.

As a new photographer, I don’t really know much about art selection, objectivity in art, and what people look for in photographs. I just know what I like. So, I was interested in learning what museum curator’s look for when selecting pieces for exhibition. My goal for myself was to try and recreate something similar to what I saw. Not copy it, but…chase it.

I liked “Cypress Sunbeam” quite a bit and studied how it was shot. The waves have a lot of contrast between the dark crests and reflected light. Obviously, it wasn’t long exposure and the photo didn’t look bracketed. The colors of the sky and clouds are quite bold and blend smoothly. One thing of particular note was the placement of the camera and the patience to frame the shot so the sun was peaking below the moss of the central tree.

For my photo I wanted to capture something very much in the vein of Louisiana as well. There’s a place I’ve been to before over in Madisonville that has this really cool looking, burned-out tugboat. Just beyond the tugboat is an old light house. It’s located on the Tchefuncte River and is a perfect place to view a sunset. However, the mosquitos in this area are particularly horrendous.

I wanted my shot to be pretty technical and complex. I didn’t have an ND filter so I knew long exposure for the shot I had in mind was kind of out of the question. I also wanted to frame the shot so that the sun was casting a bright reflection on the water in between the old dock legs. I wanted that sun reflection right in the center of that dock walkway.

For the shot I had in mind, I knew I had to take a bracketed shot of just the tugboat to get it looking a certain way, wait to shoot the sun on the water so the reflection was just right, wait for the sun to set and shoot just for that placement since the sun would be setting in a location that wouldn’t be ideal so I could move it over a bit in post, and shoot a bracketed shot for the contrast detail in the water waves and lighthouse in the distance.

I ended up taking 37 pictures, 9 bracketed shots for each area of interest, and blended them all together manually.

I ended up having to Photoshop out a lot of the mosquitos that were getting in the frame and on the lens. It was quite ridiculous. Not only that, but I meticulously dodged and burned the water waves to really make them pop. (Yes, that took some time).

This is one of those images that I let sit on my computer for a several days as I mulled over every detail to make sure I was happy with everything.

Week 6: Pilings
Project: Go To a Museum
Picture 2

While I was doing these shots, I noticed to the left of me there were these wooden pilings sticking out of the water. They were originally meant to secure boats, I suppose. I noticed if you stood in a certain spot the posts lined up in a certain way that made me quite happy. However, just beyond these posts the water went from calm to ripples from the difference in depth (again, I’m guessing).

So, I set up my camera again for a long exposure shot. Why not get two photos this week? I loved how the piling to the far right stuck up far enough to just breach itself into the sky while another post at the center was tall enough to reach up just enough to intrude into that ripples section. The sun had just set so the sky had this subtle pastel color to it.

I gotta be honest, I ended up liking this image best of the two.

To get these shots I traveled about 100 miles in total. It was nice though. It got me out of my comfort zone and it got me to work on a landscape photo that I wouldn’t normally do. I guess that’s the whole point of this particular challenge and why I enjoyed it so much. I should do landscapes more often and really take focus on how to apply the Zone System.

Week 7: Go Beyond the Print or Digital Image

05/04/2021

Week 7: Self Control
Project: Go Beyond the Print or Digital Image

This week’s challenge forces the photographer to take their images beyond where they typically live: the computer screen. After all, too many pictures solely exist on screens, the Facebook wall, the Instagram feed, etc.

The example given for this round was printing on wood. However, I didn’t really have the time to take a new photo and place an order for it to be printed on some lamp shade or image cube. The challenge requests that the photographer examine their work and think beyond the screen or printed image. What else can be done beyond what you can spit out of an Epson printer? This means, the photographer can paint on their print, airbrush on it, print it out on metal, basically just give it a life beyond how it would normally be displayed.

I’ve tried my hand at painting and drawing and lack some significant talent in that department. But when I came across the work of Joana Choumali, who sews on her prints, I thought I could give that a try. I mean, I learned how to sew when I was very young and still fix my own clothing and shoes to this day. So yeah, sewing on a print was something I could do.

I had several ideas for this challenge but started to run out of time when other projects started to come in that were aside from my Ceative52 pursuit. One simple image that kept recurring to me was the image of a disembodied arm, hovering in open space, and controlling its shoulder portion with strings. I figured I could take a picture of my arm, sew the strings in after printing it, then side-light the finished piece to get the shadows of the strings.

I had just started working out again and struggling to change my diet. Having the will power to wake up early, eat the right things, not eat after a certain point, do cardio after a night of fasting, etc. etc. doesn’t come naturally to me. My renewed interest in making some positive changes to my body and diet is what inspired this.

To do this I found that you’ve got to cover the back of the photo with masking tape. I went out and bought some embroidery string as well as some other essentials. I covered the back of the photo with masking tape and poked holes in the areas I knew I would be pulling string through. Instead of tying the string into a knot to hold it in place, I simply taped the string ends down with more tape. This way, when I pasted the image up on the wall to take a photo, there would be no bulging points.

Once the sewing was done I hung up a piece of white foam core and adhered the image with double-sided tape. I cross lit the image with two LED lights, one at direct left and one at the right and slightly above. I played with the angles to get the shadows of the string to be a certain way.

Of course, after this I had to transfer the new photograph into Lightroom where I made sure everything was straight and cropped just right. I did some cloning and healing to get rid of any frayed paper parts from the holes to make it look like the strings are going more into, around, and from the skin areas. I also used a trick when it comes to photographing artwork: I tweak the light levels using Threshold in Photoshop to make sure all the lighting is nice and even across the image.

All in all, it’s not my favorite challenge but it did force me to think outside the box a bit and push myself in what can be done with photography.

Week 8: Collaborate with Another Artist

05/10/2021

Week 8: Hook – Across Neverland
Project: Collaborate with Another Artist

This week’s challenge came along at an opportune time. Right when Week 8 was coming around I was approached by Bayou Cirque to create a poster, flyer, and logo for an upcoming show called “Hook: Across Neverland.”

I’d worked with Bayou Cirque before when I shot some of their practice routines and their Dark Circus show at the Manship Theatre in Baton Rouge, LA. Also, I have a soft spot in my heart for Cirque stuff, seeing as how I worked with Cirque Dreams for two years as a musician. So, this was the perfect first poster/flyer project for me to dive into.

Making posters for movies and events is definitely something I want to get good at. It’s a challenge because you have to sum up what the show is about with a single dynamic image. When I think of great movie posters I think of The Exorcist and Jaws. They’re simple images, but you look at them and you know what they’re about and you want to check it out.

With this poster, the Bayou Cirque people gave me a rundown of the show, some images I might be able to use, some company logos, and creative freedom to come up with whatever I wanted. I was able to use their main image for Captain Hook but the rest of the images were fairly small JPG images that weren’t scaling well. So, I ended up using a couple of images from my own photoshoot with them during their previous stint at the Manship Theatre.

I knew I wanted Captain Hook in the center with his sword at rest. I also wanted to get across intrigue, adventure, and more importantly that it was a Cirque-style show. This proved difficult because to get across “cirque” you really have to have images of people in costumes, doing their act, stage props, etc. Including a bunch of that stuff would, I feel, make the poster too busy.

I initially was going for a Cirque Du Soleil style poster with the layout design. However, one thing I didn’t think about is when you have a show called “Hook: Across Neverland,” it really has to come across that it’s not a Play but a Cirque show. My first design gave the impression that it was probably something like a live theatre performance… like a play or something.

So, I opted to put some images of high-flying routines in the sky along with the clouds and blended in with the sky as if they were memories or visions.
I actually had to make this flyer twice because the initial background image I had wasn’t working with the inclusion of the acrobats in the sky. But, you live and learn.

I had several ideas on placement of the images. At one point, I even tried putting in a Tinkerbell figure but really hated the way it looked. There was some confusion on the final show name, as well. I actually like the final name “Hook: Across Neverland” so I’m glad that stuck.

After bouncing ideas back and forth and making several changes, we all agreed on the final image and I’m quite pleased on how it turned out.

To wrap things up, I used several layers of textures to give the flyer a distressed look like an old pirate map whenever it is printed.

Week 9: Make a Mess

05/17/2021

Week 9: Holi Warrior
Project: Make a Mess

Now this challenge is up my alley. I was looking forward to this one because I’ve made a mess on several occasions with photoshoots. I’ve done the Holi powder thing before, done the milk bath, done the sparks and smoke and paint.
This time around I wanted to do another Holi powder shoot because I really love the texture and color you can get with the stuff; however, this time around, I could use a new 70-200mm lens which is much sharper than the original 50mm I used before, plus a nifty strobe light to help freeze motion and really bring out the dust particles in the air.

Unfortunately for me, I don’t have a huge space to work with. I typically shoot stuff in my kitchen and I really wanted to cover Gina in Holi powder and have her jumping around. After trying to get in touch with a couple of rental spaces, no one called me back. So, I was stuck with using my kitchen again. This meant I couldn’t really capture a jumping around scene.

The “hero” image for this shoot was shot by having Gina shake her head back and forth while keeping her eyes open. She tried clapping her hands together to make a Holi explosion and it looked cool but it just didn’t look the way I had the image in my mind. I really wanted to get her green eyes set against the bright red, yellow, purple, and orange colors.

It took a few tries but I ended up catching one image with her eyes open, well lit by the fill light, and the dust just happened to be falling in such a way that filled the empty space. Had I known then what I know now I would have backlit the scene to further emphasize the dust.

Wrapping things up, I was also able to catch a cool moment afterwards where Gina saw herself in the mirror for the first time with all the powder on. I really love taking pictures of people in mirrors getting ready for something. Whether it’s a dancer, acrobat, cirque performer, musician…whatever the case may be, I just like the moment in a mirror where you can see the performer putting their other-self on.

Week 10: Use a Location to Wow

05/24/2021

building m95 — Week 10: Building M95
Project: Use a Location to Wow

This week’s challenge is called “Use a Location to Wow.” I looked all around for cool locations in Louisiana, and indeed there are many cool locations to visit here. But what do you think about when you consider Louisiana locations? You think of mossy trees, swamps, alligators, Mardi Gras, New Orleans. Basically, everything I have no interest in. So, I racked my brain for something else.

How was I going to use a location to impress? I thought about going to a waterfall over by Mississippi called Tunica Falls, dressing in a suit, and standing under the water with an umbrella. I thought about the twisty, massive trees by the State Capitol and how I could incorporate those. I just didn’t think it was “wow” worthy. But then it came to me. It was right in front of me the whole time. Why not use the planetarium I work at? After all, my planetarium is one of the most technologically advanced in the Southern region. It’s the biggest in the state. The dome is huge. It’s beautiful. And I knew I could incorporate images from Hubble as well as some of my own photo trickery.

Was in lazy simply using my workplace to have a “wow” moment. Maybe. But to course correct, I decided to make this shoot complicated to really emphasize the dome and how it looks.

If you didn’t already know, I’m a planetarium producer—this means I make planetarium shows. I use a lot of different software programs like Digital Sky, Blender, 3DS Max, OpenSpace, etc. to create content on a continuous basis for my planetarium. Many people don’t know what it takes to build planetarium shows from the ground up so I thought I’d kinda do a play on that mystery. It would be a more literal approach to building a Sky Show by actually building a Sky.

My “Use a Location to Wow” is me building a planetarium show from scratch. Not using CGI programs but actually making stars and placing them up on the dome.

In the middle of doing this shoot I was already neck deep into working on my newest “Summer Sky Tonight 2021” featurette (debuting June 20^th). In the show, I mention M95 (Messier 95) and how it appears close to Venus and Mars this season after sunset. M95 is a beautiful barred spiral galaxy which can be spotted in the constellation Leo the Lion. It’s located 33 to 35 million light-years away from us and has about 40 billion stars. Its spiral arms host a flurry of star birth activity and sparkles with the light of countless young, blue stars.

I used an actual image of M95 to create this composite and pumped up the colors to accentuate the glowing star regions.

To make this image I knew I wanted to be on a ladder, handing off a star I had just made into the M95 image above.

I went to the store and bought a Styrofoam ball and some battery powered pixie lights. These tiny lights were wrapped around the ball and attached with floral wire.

I knew that in order to get a good representation of the planetarium dome and sky I would have to take multiple images because I knew I was going to be shooting at a low angle and in portrait mode to capture me on a ladder, reaching up towards the dome. To make this image I knew it was going to have to be a big canvas. So, I shot 10 images with just the ladder and 1 image with me to be comp’ed in later.

Each image processed and stitched together in PTGui.

The 6 images were processed in Lightroom and then stitched together with PTGui. After these images were combined together I brought them into Photoshop and added the image of me on the ladder. After some aligning and masking/blending I had a workable image that I cropped down to a square format and then downsized from 9K to 4K.

I knew I wasn’t going to be able to put an image on the dome because it would simply make the theater too dark. Plus, I’d have more control in post if I just made the dome white and overlayed the image of M95 on top. By doing this I could just use a blending mode to bring out the seams of the dome panels; however some fine tuning and saturation enhancements would have to be done to bring out the life of the M95 image.

Of course, I enhanced the star ball with some color dodging over multiple layers as well as adding smoke and fire to not only the main starball but the string of tiny stars coming out of my tool belt. The smoke was added using a custom Photoshop brush over a series of layers. And yes, I bought a tool belt specifically for this image.

When making an image like this you have to keep in mind how the light from your fake light source would actually interact with the rest of the environment. By using some more color dodging I painted additional light spill onto the seats below me as well as on my shirt, face, and arms.

This was shot at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum in the Irene W. Pennington Planetarium. This planetarium has a 60 foot dome, a 4K Sony laserlight projection system, 5.1 surround sound, and 171 seats.

Week 11: Capture Movement

05/31/2021

Week 11: Red and Yellow Flower Explosion Go Boom Boom
Project: Capture Movement

For me, there are three ways to capture movement in photography: freeze the action by using a fast shutter speed, blur the action by using a slow shutter speed, or simulate action by using posing and props (think of food photography where things are suspended with wires or wedding photography where a veil is held out by someone off camera to simulate a flowing look).

That being said, for this week’s challenge I had a lot of ideas on how to capture motion. But, I typically throw out my first few ideas because I think those ideas are usually going to be the first ones other people think of first as well. So, having a girl whip her hair around is out; leaf blower blowing a dress all about is out; person jumping on a trampoline with smoke is out; throwing a cat over a fence is out; a skateboarder doing a high flying trick is out; catching an arrow flying at my head is out.

Three images came to mind though that I just couldn’t shake. And, to me, that’s a good sign. If I can fully imagine an image and I can’t get that image out of my head, then I want to shoot it.

The first image I wanted to make was that of a guitar fly through the air while wrapped in a white sheet. I wanted to shoot this low and almost directly up to the sky so that the guitar, sheet, clouds, and blue sky all worked together and made it look like a guitar was literally flying and flew through someone’s clothes line. I wanted to go up on my roof and just hurl a guitar across my yard. And, I must say, initially I wanted to have the sheet be wet so that it conformed to the body of the guitar, but this wasn’t working out and it just looked like a sheet being tossed into the air.

Of course, I didn’t want to do this with any of my guitars. I’m not going to be throwing my expensive guitars around, that’s for sure. That meant I’d have to go buy a cheap guitar from a pawn shop to do this.

The second image I wanted to make was using some old flower vases, filling them with paint, and shattering them with a sling shot. Yes, I know shattering vases with a high speed camera has been done but I had some specific ideas in mind that I thought were intriguing: Clear glass vases, filled with flowers, with complimentary colored water and paint in different densities. By that, I mean, I wanted to layer the colors in the vase and have them interact once exploded.

The third idea was to have my girlfriend dress up as a rock star and smash a guitar to pieces in the vein of The Clash’s “London Calling” album cover. But I’m talking about smashing the shit out of the guitar like the way The Who did it. I wanted splinters, springs, strings, pickups just shooting out all over the place.

I was able to do the first two ideas but haven’t gotten around to shooting the rock star one yet.

For the Flying Guitar image, I went to my local pawn shop to find the cheapest guitar they had. As luck would have it, they had a white guitar for just $45. I knew this white color would mesh with the clouds perfectly, and it was the cheapest one they had. Win-win.

“Can I help you find something,” she asked.
“Yeah, I’ll take that white guitar there,” I said.
“Alright, do you want to play it first?”
“Not really.”
“It sounds pretty sweet. You don’t want to plug it in?”
“Lady, I’ll be honest with you. I have no intention of playing this guitar. I’m just buying it to destroy it for a photo.”
“Alrighty.”

And that’s how that shit went down. I brought the guitar home, set up my camera, waited for the clouds and sun to be in the right place, covered the guitar in a white sheet, and just started tossing it up in the air.

I used a remote trigger system to snap the shots. I was a little disappointed because the remote trigger wouldn’t allow the camera to do rapid fire multiple shots. It would trigger the camera for two or three rapid fire shots but not a continuous stream of shots if I were to hold down the shutter release myself. I don’t know, maybe I was doing it wrong or I need a better remote trigger system. So, I had to hold the remote in my left hand, launch the guitar into the air and trigger the shutter at just the right time to get two or three usable shots.

I did this about a hundred times and probably captured 4 decent shots that I knew I could work with. The two shots here are my two favorite ones. I didn’t extend the sheets; I didn’t add anything to the sheets or comp the sheets in from different shots. It was all captured in camera. The only thing I did was do a fair amount of noise reduction, dodging and burning, and shadow coloring (because the shadows had this weird yellow and grey look).

The remote trigger problem came into play again when I went to do my exploding vase shots.

The plan was to set everything up, get a ton of light on the vase so I can shoot at a super high shutter speed, get my sling shot ready, trigger the remote shutter with my foot, and fire away. The problem was the remote trigger just wouldn’t set off a string of shutter releases that was consistent. This made using a strobe kinda useless, too. I had to rethink it.

I opted to wait for my girlfriend to get home so she could hold the shutter down for me. I put a set of high-output worklights on the vase, three video lights, and I shot outdoors to get as much light into my camera as possible.

For the color effect I tried to use acrylic paint and water with food coloring. The idea was to have the thick paint settle at the bottom of the vase with the lighter toned, food colored water to be more towards the top. The idea was that when the vase shattered the duel toned liquids would mix in interesting ways. Well, it didn’t quite work out with the blue vase but the results were still fairly interesting.

It did work, however, for the red vase.

For the red water and yellow flowers picture I put yellow and reddish-pink acrylic paint at the bottom of the vase, filled it with water and added some orange food coloring which eventually turned red when I added more acrylic paint. I stirred the yellow paint at the bottom to break up any clumps.

I aimed lower for the red water/yellow flowers shot to try and get that yellow acrylic paint mixed in, and it worked. The colors you see in the photo were not manipulated. You can see the yellow paint in the “wings” of the explosion and how there is this red rim around them. A really cool effect.

I dodged and burned the highlights and shadows, but other than that, the colors weren’t changed in post.

The ammunition I used were glass pebbles bought in the craft section of Walmart. They’re the kind you typically buy to use at the bottom of a vase to hold fake flowers in place. They also double nicely for sling shot ammo. The idea for using glass pebbles was that if I caught it frozen in frame it would either look like part of the vase or break apart entirely.

One of the pebbles survived but I never found the second one.

While shooting these vases with a sling shot I put a thick blanket on a chair right behind what I was shooting. I didn’t want the pebble to go into my window or bounce off a brick wall. I wanted to basically shoot into this blanket. I also highly recommend using eye protection, even if it’s sunglasses.

Stupidly enough, I opted not to wear eye protection cause I didn’t think the explosion was going to be very significant. The first one wasn’t but for the red water/yellow flowers shot I really cocked back and let ‘er have it. The water and paint went everywhere: all over the lights, backdrop, and me. I was lucky that no little shard of glass went into my eye cause I was picking up little fragments outside for a while.

I shot this with a piece of white foam core behind the vase. The idea was that I was going to take a plate shot first—a shot with the unbroken vase and a clean background. After I had my explosion shots I was going to take out the backsplash and just have the water bursting out of the vase. Basically, I wanted the background clean and free from droplets. So, I had to reverse the foam core after each vase shot as well as move the white sheet around to get rid of the blue paint from the previous shot.

This was shot at 1/4000^th shutter speed and f/9 (I believe). I would’ve shot faster but I was losing light and had to get things moving. Unfortunately, I had to use an ISO higher than I wanted cause of the loss of ambient light.

Overall, a fun challenge with some beautiful results.

Week 12: Create an Amazing Silhouette

06/07/2021

Week 12: Door Silhouette
Project: Create an Amazing Silhouette

To me, a silhouette is kinda like a memory. Memories are unclear, often shadowy; they’re incomplete. As a kid, I remember seeing these old-fashioned silhouettes on black paper in old people’s houses. I usually would see these at a grandparents house or in some old home, usually above the piano or fireplace. That’s always been my perception of how silhouettes were used. Just a completely blacked out figure in outline against a clean white backdrop.

But now, people think of silhouettes differently because of those iconic Apple Music ads.

Silhouettes are kinda like logos now. You’ve got a well defined shape against a clean background, it’s easy to make out what it is, there are no mergers to muddy the shape.

But for this challenge, I wanted to go back to my original perception of silhouettes and what they illicit: the unclear memory. I had this image in my head of a woman standing in a doorway with intense bright light spilling out around her, slightly wrapping around her frame to show a small amount of detail. I wanted the center-most portions of the subject to be in complete black but I still wanted enough detail to emphasize why it’s important enough to recall such a memory.

I still wanted to see a slight portion of the eye as well as some muscle definition in the legs and stomach.

Maybe this idea stemmed from Harry Potter at King’s Cross Station in the last Harry Potter film, or maybe it stems from a scene from Jacob’s Ladder. Whatever the case, I couldn’t shake this one image and I just had to set it up to capture it.

To make this image, I hung up a white sheet slightly beyond the doorway. I then got as many lights as I had and put them all just a tad to the left and right of the frame. I also put several lights just behind her body frame as well for added illumination but to also completely black out the majority of her body.

For a while I contemplated getting rid of the door itself entirely. However, I think that the inclusion of the door, with its door handle, sets the scene as well as having a hint of invitation.

I didn’t want any clothing to muddle up the lines of her body but I also didn’t want anything overtly nude to distract and call attention away from the lines of the form. So, the idea was to retain the shape of the body but not to the point where it’s overtly exhibitionist. I specifically wanted as many triangles to be made as well. Every joint that could bend was bent to create triangles and areas of contrast between the darkest parts and the brightest.

Week 13: Restrict Yourself to a $20 Budget

06/14/2021

Week 13: Redemption
Project: Restrict Yourself to a $20 Budget

When I get an idea for a photo I typically go to the store and spend way too much money on stuff that will probably not even be used for the final photo. Yes, I’ll go to the craft store, the Walmart, the Target, the whatever and just buggy-up on stuff that I think I can use–not only for the week but for the weeks to come.

I currently have drawers and closets filled with stuff that I might be able to use in the future for some image that might pop into my head. But for this particular project the challenge was to restrict yourself to just $20 for one session. That means, whatever you don’t have for the project, you can only spend $20 to complete the scene.

Gina had to record a dance video for an upcoming online performance so I used that as an opportunity to get this challenge in. Of course, she already had her outfit but we needed a few other things to complete the scene. And when you absolutely, positively have to spend as little as you can on a crafty project then no place is better than your local Walmart, right?

The total haul was the yellow silk rose bundle, a few sets of Tulle fabric, and a cheap black bad sheet. The centerpiece for this whole picture was actually the sun goddess headpiece. For that, I already had the material. This headpiece is actually only made out of some zip ties and a generic head band. All you have to do is get a variety pack of zip ties and fasten them to the headband like you see in the picture. Then, paint it gold.

If I could go back and change anything I would probably clip the ends of the zip ties since they have this bend at the ends. I mean, it doesn’t really matter cause it still looks like gold metal but, if you know they’re zip ties, the little bends at the end really give it away.

I shot this with my Godox AD600pro with a beauty dish attached for the side light and I put a Godox AD100pro just behind Gina’s head to get that burst of light behind the crown and to light up the tulle veil. In a couple of the shots I had to replace the floor so you couldn’t tell it was in my tiny kitchen.

The video was shot with GVM LED lights. This video will be live on July 5th at 11am.

Week 14: Be a Voyeur

06/22/2021

Week 14: Air Drying
Project: Be a Voyeur

When I think about being a voyeur, the first thing that comes to mind is “peeping tom.” I’m not too down with that. After all, voyeurism is pretty much getting off on watching people in intimate moments when they don’t know you’re watching them. Not really my thing. But, if you think about it, being a “voyeur” can really be a lot of things. When I was trying to come up with ideas for a “voyeur” challenge I was trying to think of things beyond watching a person undress from around the corner. I was thinking about taking photos of people in public when they didn’t know I was around. I thought about taking a picture of someone singing along to music while in their car.

I took the photo on the left from inside my office when I saw this person studying, alone, while outside by the “paper clips” dock. It didn’t really speak to me though.

Basically, I didn’t want to do a standard portrait of a woman in her underwear, buttoning up her garter belt while slightly being obscured by a curtain.

One image that kept coming back to me was of a woman drying her toenails by dangling her legs out a window.

Why would she be drying her toenails this way and how would she be occupying her time while they dried?

Some people have a foot fetish; some people have a thing for legs. Some people have a thing for watching people when they don’t know they’re being watched.

The composition of the whole thing was to have bare feet with cotton balls in between the toes, exposed calves; leading lines with the window frame, window ledge, and blinds; a cat looking at me, aware of my presence while the woman inside the window is minding her own business; finally, have foreground elements to give a sense of depth and to possibly give the illusion that the photographer is in some bushes. I also used a telephoto lens to get far away from the subject. I also decided to strip away the color so you only focus on and are drawn to the light areas.

This is one of the few times that all the elements came together quickly.

Week 15: Show Your Subject Multiple Times In A Single Frame

06/29/2021

Week 15: The Way
Project: Show Your Subject Multiple Times in a Single Frame

Don’t you hate when you’ve been battling evil all day, you come home for a break, go to the bathroom to splash some water on your face, then you go to look up at yourself in the mirror only to find a HORRIBLE DEMON LOOKING BACK AT YOU INSTEAD!!??And so goes the well-known trick in photography and film where you show the same subject multiple times in the frame. It’s a fun thing to do and can be pretty easy with a fair bit of planning. I’ll be honest, I’ve done this type of photo trick before. I have this on-going tradition of taking pictures of myself during my birthday with multiple Jays in the frame. It’s fun, yes. But it can be tricky if not well thought out.

For this particular challenge I wanted to have three ladies sitting together–kinda like a family portrait–but each lady is the same person, dressed differently, posed differently, and interacting with each other physically somehow. Let’s face it, it’s easy to take a photo of yourself standing in different parts of the room and just masking it all together. It’s a bit more complicated if you want them all interacting in some way.

The idea behind this shot was inspired by the movie poster for A Tale of Two Sisters and the painting of the Ghostbusters at the end of Ghostbusters 2.

I kinda wanted it to look like a creepy old painting you’d find in some big, abandoned house that was previously owned by a coven of witches.

I wanted three women to represent Id, Ego, and Superego–in a sense. The idea was to have two women seated in chairs with a devilish woman behind them both with her hand on their shoulders. The hand gesture of Baphomet is also being employed here: as above, so below; to give, and to receive.

I learned some valuable lessons while doing this challenge in how to create shadows and how I would’ve done the whole thing differently. I actually used C-stands with wooden dowel rods to mark the shoulders of both women so the devil woman would know where to put her hands for her individual photo. So, this was shot three times, each time with increasing makeup and different outfits. I used a softbox to the side with a second strobe light hanging from my ceiling. (I find lighting from high above can give an otherworldly look at times).

Week 16: Immortalize Your Hero

07/05/2021

Week 16: Parents
Project: Immortalize Your Hero

Anyone who knows me would probably think that I would figure out some way to Photoshop Ayn Rand’s face onto Bruce Campbell’s body. But if it’s one thing I’ve learned while living this life on Earth is that your heroes never quite live up to your expectations. I’m pretty sure if I ever hung out with Ayn Rand she’d really dislike me.
In the hero department, I’ve always had a large stable of people to look up to–artists who kinda set the standard. In music there’s been Yanni, Dave Mustaine, Joe Satriani. In writing there’s been Clive Barker and David Foster Wallace. And in photography, well, it’s still pretty new to me so I haven’t really found that one photographer who has shaped my style. After all, I got into photography having only the desire to shoot the stars and cosmos for work.

So, when I thought about this challenge I thought about the people that helped shape who I am today as well as those that never let me down.

Of course, that comes down to my parents.

When I was a kid, I remember when my dad came home from work he always gave my mom a hug. He always bought her flowers on her birthday and anniversary…and sometimes he bought her flowers “just because.” My dad taught me to not start eating dinner until mom joined us at the table. He taught me how to tie a tie, work on a car, and how to throw a punch if that school bully got too uppity. Basically, my dad taught me–by good example–on how to treat women, take care of my responsibilities, and to stand up for myself.

In adolescence, I remember telling my mom that I wanted to date someone who was very similar to myself (same taste in music, movies, books, etc). She told me what a stupid idea this was. “Why would you want to date someone with the exact same interests? How boring would that be?” Whenever I was sick, she took care of me. Whenever I was outside playing, she’d have lunch made for me. There was also a time I begrudgingly agreed to participate in a March of Dimes volunteer program. When I tried to back out, she told me I made a promise and should always finish what I start. Follow through with your promises, she said.

Both my parents taught me how to try and stand out: when running for class office make your sign a different and bold color; when speaking in public make sure to throw in a joke. They taught me to work hard first and play later.
I could go on and on talking about the positive influence my parents had on my life. But, in short, I’ll just add that I wouldn’t be half the man I am today if not for my parents. So, for this challenge, I visited my mother and father at their house (my mom had just come out of the hospital from surgery) to take their picture. I had this very specific image in my mind that would involve a headshot from both, set to the upper left and right of a square frame, then an image of their hands and wedding bands together at the bottom. I wanted it to be fairly contrasty with heavy use of shadows to give it a timeless feeling.
It came out pretty much exactly the way I had in mind.

If there’s an important person in your life, take a photo of them.

Week 17: Show Time, Change, or Transformation

07/12/2021

Week 17: Fire Dance
Project: Show Time, Change, or Transformation

A photograph captures a moment in time but it can also show a sequence or change: Blurry motion can show the speed of a car, and a before-and-after photo can show age. Initially, for this challenge I thought about doing a day-to-night photo. But here we are approaching hurricane season in Louisiana and there’s been a steady forecast for cloudy weather the next several weeks.

I started to think of other ways to show time and change and I thought about long-exposure fire photos using rear-sync flash. I was asked to do a photoshoot for my girlfriend and her belly dance friends at Fontainbleu State Park in Mandeville, LA. It’s a lovely area and presenting an opportunity to do this challenge since they wanted to get some photos using fire palms at some point.

Below are some examples of the beach shoot we did. It’s not related to the challenge but the photos came out great and I thought I’d show a few here:

Once it got dark they broke out some fire palms and LED fans and started doing a few routines for practice. I set up my strobe and began snapping away, trying to find a good long exposure shutter speed that not only captures the path of the fire but also freezing the motion to get a good image of their faces.

What was interesting was that by the time I started shooting the fire shots, my strobe had begun to overheat a bit and was taking a long time to cycle. So, most of the shots I got were misfires where the strobe didn’t go off. These actually turned out to be some of the best shots since the background was completely dark and the glow of the fire created interesting blur patterns on the body.
Model instagram: @_frizzy_lizzie_

Week 18: Subject Mimics Background

07/19/2021

Week 18: Sky Veil
Project: Subject Mimics Background

When out and about taking pictures of the Ancient Bones Dance Theater gals at Fontainbleu State Park, I was reminded of some photos where the photographer would blend the colors of the subject’s clothing with the beach, horizon, and sky. With that in mind, I took a few shots in that vein specifically for the challenge of “Subject Mimics Background.”

image: August Ostberg
https://www.instagram.com/augustostberg/

Look, in some cases I’m sure the photographer can prepare for such a shoot and say, “I’m going to have blue jeans to match the water, and then aqua blue to match the sky, and I’m going to shoot over here so that the jeans end where the beach sand begins…” but the reality is that in the vast majority of cases there’s a lot of digital manipulation to fudge the details to finally match up just right.

In this case, I made sure to get the horizon to line up with the skirt at the waist. From there I knew I could match colors between the clothing, veil, background and foreground.

For the sky, I slightly changed the already pinkish-reddish color of the clouds to match the hot pink hue of the veil but also tried to match the deep blue in the upper part of the sky with the remaining blue of the veil as well. Further down on the horizon I changed the glow of the setting sun to match the color of her sequins around her waist line. I then warped the veil slightly to match the flow of the clouds–in a way the upper flow of the veil continues into the clouds which I thought was a happy occurrence. Finally, I changed the highlights of her skirt to match the color of the sand and blended the pink hues of the veil to slightly bleed into the color of the sand as it got closer to the bottom.

Follow Lizzie Louise on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frizzy_lizzie/

Week 19: Build a Set

07/28/2021

I’m a little behind this week. I had a paid gig and I had to edit and finish up a video shoot. However, it was on this video shoot that I decided to kill two birds with one stone and complete the Week 19 challenge of “Build a Set.”
Photography is more than relying on your model to show up in something cool looking and then clicking a button. Sometimes you have to round out the outfit with a scene. For this shoot, Gina had to film a video representing a pagan practice. She had grapes, wine, candles, sunflowers, and she wanted to dance in the rain for a section. I wound up going to Eye Wander studio in Baton Rouge to do this. There were a couple of props but for the most part we brought all of our own stuff. Eye Wander’s studio was very big with plenty of backdrops to choose from and a shower head right inside the studio by the bay door.

For one shot, we ended up using a chair that matched the grapes, a backdrop that matched the skirt and tablecloth, and for some of the shots I used a color temperature orange gel on the strobe bulb to help match the sunflower color and to mimic sunset lighting. I saw there was a cool looking couch there so I moved it in front of the bay door and snapped a few impromptu shots using a portable fan to blow Gina’s hair. I thought her outfit and style would stand up nice in contrast with the clean, white couch and bright windows.

The rain shots were done by using a strobe to backlight and a smaller strobe towards the front for fill (also using a color temperature orange gel). The best way to get rain and falling water to stand out and not look like a fuzzy haze is to backlight the falling water.

Gina danced to Danheim’s “Blodfest” and will be available soon on YouTube.
We did all this in two hours. I managed to wrap it all up with one minute to spare.

That’s time management skills, folks.

Location: https://www.instagram.com/eyewanderphoto

Model: https://www.instagram.com/ginakaos

Week 20: Use a Reflection

08/02/2021

Week 20: What’s Next?
Project: Use a Reflection

Let me tell you a quick story behind this image here. When I was a kid I remember there was some occasion at my house. I don’t remember if it was a birthday, a holiday, an anniversary or what, but it was some occasion. Well, as things were winding down for the night I remember looking around and not seeing my dad anywhere. For some reason I looked out the window and saw my dad standing in the driveway, kinda looking up at the house, arms crossed, by himself, at night. I didn’t know if there was a problem with the roof, something in the sky, or what.

So I go outside to ask him what’s going on. Without really looking at me he said he was just looking at the house and thinking about what he had and what he’d built over the years. He said he remembered how little my sister and I used to be, how the first house he and my mom had was so tiny and the new house was so much better. He was just kind of reflecting on his life and how proud he was at where things were at.

That’s the kind of reflection I wanted to create for this week’s image. Instead of using mirrors, water, glass, etc. I decided to use “reflection” more metaphorically. Because not only is this challenge about “reflections” it also fits in with my annual birthday selfie composite. For the past couple of years I’ve taken pictures with myself interacting with other copies of myself. Well, I just turned 45 and I wanted to do something a little different this year.

For me, I never had kids. Instead, each year I’ve always tried to do something I hadn’t done before. I’ve always had some goal on the horizon to reach for. And, for the most part, I’ve reached most of those goals in some shape or form.

At 14 I wanted to get my band signed to a record deal. At 45 I’ve been able to sign a couple of record deals to release two albums, and we’re currently working on our third. In this image you can see some of the many guitars I’ve used over the years to create the music I love. I’d always wanted to be a touring musician, too. Back in the day, I auditioned for Cirque Du Soleil and ended up landing a touring gig with Cirque Dreams for two years for both a national and international tour. In this image you can see one of the signed drum heads from the first tour as well as some promotional poster art that my image was used for on the Cirque Dreams tour. As I writer I always wanted to release a book and sign a book deal. Having crafted a novel, I started writing short stories to build up credentials. In doing so, I’ve got a few things published in fiction as well as some things published in magazines that deal with music. You can see the first book I was ever published in above the CD rack along with the first book I’d ever had a photograph published in as well.

Which brings me to photography. I’m not sure where I’m headed with photography or what my goals are. I’m still at the stage of trying to figure things out. That’s why, in the image, instead of me looking at all the stuff around me and thinking back on all the good times, I’m holding a blank notebook as I think about what to fill the empty pages with for the future. I’ve got my girl with me as she works on what she loves. And, of course, I’ve got my cat by my side as well.
This image was actually a tricky shot since I had to take three pictures to fill the frame with most of what was in the studio space (minus the studio workstation behind the camera). And I wanted it to be a fisheye shot since, to me, fisheye photography is tied to my other passion in life, planetariums. The fisheye look also reminds me of looking through a door, looking into a different world almost. I also wanted this to look like someone was able to take an image directly from my mind. If this were possible I don’t think the image would look so perfect and pristine but black & white, scratchy, and warped.

Week 21: Go Macro

08/12/2021

Macro photography. Oh boy. This is difficult for me seeing as how I don’t have a macro lens.

For those that don’t know, macro photography is a 1 to 1 ratio shot, the size of the sensor is basically the frame. So, you typically see macro photography when you see those super closeup shots of bugs, flowers, water drops, etc. Typically you would use a macro lens that can shoot a 1:1 ratio but, for me, the only thing that I have that’s close to macro is my 70-200 lens which is just very sharp and can shoot pretty close up, and my Ricoh GRiii which has a macro setting.

Basically, I had to kinda fake a macro look. But what to shoot? Macro photography can be a little cliche. Like I said, you typically see flowers and bugs shot in macro.

Well, one day I walked outside and saw this butterfly on the top of my car. I attempted to shoot a photo of the lil’ guy without disturbing him but I found that in order to get most of him in focus I had to shoot several shots and combine them later in Photoshop. Shooting macro gives you a very small depth of field. The image of the butterfly is actually three shots combined and I still didn’t get the very tips of the wings in focus. Basically, when I was done I had a picture of a butterfly. Who cares? How many of these shots have you seen?
So, I wasn’t happy with the challenge.

Next, I was going to shoot some stuff under glass with water, syrup, food coloring, etc. Something abstract. But then I had the idea of using my girlfriend’s tongue. For human subjects, many macro shots focus on lips and eyes. But my girlfriend has a very long tongue so I decided to do a shot of that with some very glossy lipstick on.

Once I was done I figured I’d frame it to look like an alternative metal band’s album cover from the late 90s. That negative white space at the top would be a great spot for a band name.

I used my Sigma 7-200 for this one. I side lit her and shot a strobe directly at her from above my camera lens. I had her put on lipstick, glitter, and then a thick layer of lip gloss. I really liked how the texture of the tongue, the veins, and shine of the lips comes out. The nose ring points to the tongue as well as the ball and cone point up to where the tongue leads.

It’s sexy, it’s provocative, and yes that’s her real tongue.

Week 22: Abstract a Portrait

08/17/2021

Week 22: Clue
Project: Abstract a Portrait

You know, before I started this Creative52 venture I had already done quite a bit of abstract portraits. And by abstract portrait what I’m talking about is having a portrait represent a theme. For example, you would take the concept of “fear” and have a portrait represent that in some way. So, how do you represent “fear” in a portrait?

Well, I started this series I called “Hidden Factors” which is supposed to do that very thing. It takes hidden human qualities buried down low and shows it as a portrait abstraction. However, I didn’t want any of those pictures to be a part of this challenge. Instead, I recently did a photo shoot with the Theatre Baton Rouge for their stage production of Clue.

Now, they’ve done a movie of “Clue” before from way back in the day. And if you watch the movie you’ll get a sense of how each character exemplifies a certain personality trait more so than the other characters. One character represents worry, one represents machismo, one represents intellect, and so on. That being said, this week’s challenge for abstracting a portrait delves into the character development as part of a theater performance, the abstract personality traits represented in playing card form.

Because if you know Clue then you know it was originally a board game, in fact, it’s best known as a board game. And with that board game you’ve got playing cards. My task in this photo shoot was to not only get some cast shots to capture the mood of the play and scenes from the play, but to also recreate the box cover of the game as well as to make a set of playing card portraits.

I looked up the various playing cards that have appeared over the years and they’re all quite different. So, I decided to do my own thing. I had to have the logo on there, the magnifying glass from the game, the character name, the character portrait, but also an aspect of the character to signal what they represent or who they are.

When taking these portraits I first got a plain-jane headshot–nothing special, just something to fall back on just in case. Then, I asked them about their character and to go nuts with giving me poses on how they act. They know their characters better than me so I just had them strike a new pose after every flash. They were all great. They all gave me great shots and great poses. It was very easy going.

They then wanted a second set of cards with the characters holding the various murder weapons.

There was extensive Photoshop work done on all of these photos. The cast shots in particular had to be worked on quite a bit because I had to extend the stage, recreate walls, add textures, add shadows, and generally give everything a painterly look. I wanted everything to have this half-portrait, half-painting look.
For the cards I wanted them to look like they were printed on cardboard. However, this would make the cards a bit hard to read and register when online. So, instead of having the texture over the entire card I only applied the effect to the portraits themselves.

All-in-all, I think I worked on the entire series for about 25 hours or so. There were all the cast shots to do and two sets of cards. I’m actually very pleased with how both sets of cards came out and it was not only fun to do this but a learning experience since I’d never designed playing cards before.

Week 23: Channel Another Artist

08/24/2021

Week 23: A Violent Reaction
Project: Channel Another Artist

I call this photo “A Violent Reaction.” When tasked to “channel another artist” for this week’s challenge, I chose a certain series by photographer Tim Tadder called “Black Is a Color.”
In his series, he poured various colors of paint over his models heads, starting with a base coat of black. The results with the glossy reflections and posing are quite lovely.

Well, I didn’t want to copy this as much as be inspired by it.

The initial idea I had was to have the color be the main focus and light the subject from different angles to get the glossy reflections that interested me so much. Tadder’s series, from what I can tell, were all on a black background. I wanted to do mine on white then change the color in post to a peach color and then have all these bright, vibrant colors dripping off the side. I just kinda wanted to have people’s eyes bleed from the colors and vibrancy. However, when I went to the store to buy paint I saw that they basically didn’t have very much to choose from. So, I started to think: what can I do with just two colors?

I decided to go with white and red and do a theme on violence and covering up violence, violence washing over someone, or repressed violence.

I knew this was going to be a difficult shot because I didn’t know what kind of paint to use on a person that wouldn’t be a nightmare to get off the skin and out of the hair. Lucky for me my girlfriend had brought me this mannequin for me to practice lighting setups. So, I took off the mannequin’s head, screwed it onto a wooden dowel rod and attached that to a set of C-stands with channel locks. I wanted to shoot this so that the paint was dripping off the side of the face and then rotate the canvas so that it looks like the paint is dripping or flying off to one side.

I lit this from all angles to get as many reflections on the paint as I could. However, I didn’t realize that the paint would also reflect everything in the room. When I zoomed in I could see reflections of my ceiling fans, my camera, and even me. I basically had to meticulously go through all the areas of reflection and Photoshop out all the room reflections but not the light reflections.

I experimented with using blue, lavender, and other paints that I had lying around but ultimately thought that white and red looked best to go with the violence theme. That being said, in the picture you can still get glimpses of blue that remained in the eyelashes. This was a happy accident as I had to replace the eye with another eye to make it look more human. After all, the mannequin head I was using was badly broken apart. The day before I shot this I had to reconstruct it with super glue. However, there was still a nasty gash in the jawline as well as a huge hole in the back of the head and a displaced ear. But, you know what, this made the theme work even better. You can still see how the gash around the chin and jaw plays up with how the paint flowed.

I think the finished result is quite lovely and disturbing at the same time. Click on the main image at the top of this week’s challenge for a bigger version. It looks best larger.

In the process of figuring this all out. I ended up combining three shots to get the right look with the drips just right.

Hurricane Ida Update

09/07/2021

I’ve been pretty consistent with this Creative52 challenge here. And when I’m almost at the half-way point I’m derailed by Hurricane Ida. Yes indeed, on Aug. 29th we were hit with a Category 4 hurricane barrelling through our city. Now, I must say, we didn’t bare the whole brunt of the hurricane. All things considered, we did pretty well. I live a little east to Baton Rouge and the eye of the hurricane was probably 60 miles east of me. It’s amazing how different we fared with just a few miles between cities.

The hurricane hit on Sunday night and the worst of it hit my area around 10pm. People more towards the south of us got hit far worse. When it was all over we were without power for about 6 days.

Before the lights went out, I was diligently working on the update for my LASM 360 project for work. Right when I wrapped up the lights went out. I took advantage of the situation and tried to take a picture for this Creative52 challenge. I had Gina meditate in the hallway while I circled her with pixie lights. I’m not pleased with the result so I don’t consider this part of the project. It’s still an interesting image in that it’s about a 10 second long exposure. You can see her hands moving from her stomach to her chest and finally above her head. That’s all in one shot. It’s cool how you can see her face behind her hands. But would I include it in my portfolio? Not really. It’s just us trying to make something cool when the power went off.

Normally, being without power isn’t that terrible of a thing. Sure you don’t have TV or lights but you can always charge your cellphone in your car, right? Well, when a hurricane careens through your state there’s a whole set of problems it brings with it. Surviving the wind and the rain is one thing, then there’s dealing with the aftermath.

People flock to gas stations to get gas for their generators. This means the few remaining gas stations that are open quickly run out of fuel. There’s also the cleanup, the heat, the trash, the food in your fridge going bad, the boredom, dealing with insurance companies, helping out friends and family in need, having roads closed due to down power lines and debris, etc. For us, one of the biggest things was dealing with not being able to get gas. Long lines at the pump, gas running out when you finally get to the pump, tempers flare…it’s no fun.

We were lucky to not get any trees on our house and no fallen limbs punctured our roof. Others weren’t so lucky.

When the power goes off in southern Louisiana the first thing you think about is air conditioning. It’s not just hot in Louisiana, it’s humid too. This makes it an oppressive heat. Trying to sleep in a hot room is one thing but trying to sleep when its hard to breathe from the humid air is another. Even with all the windows open there was no breeze coming in.

Imagine mowing your lawn, doing all this yard work, then not having any cool room to go in to cool off. People can pass out pretty quickly from this type of stuff. There’s no respite.

So, Gina and I opted to go to the planetarium and sleep. We loaded up the cat, some air mattresses, some food, and some books and headed to downtown Baton Rouge to sleep for a few days.

Living at work was actually pretty nice. First of all, the AC was amazing; second of all, I was able to get a lot of work done. With Fall right around the corner, I had a lot to wrap up for my seasonal Sky Tonight show.

We ended up staying at the museum for about three days before our power came back on. We actually stayed for an additional night after my power came back on because the gas situation was so bad I didn’t want to commute to and from work for additional days just so I could conserve gas.

With all that being said, I need about a week to get things back on track. I’m still cleaning up the house and getting things in order and the last thing on my mind right now is the Creative52 project.

Week 24: Shoot an Out of Focus Photo Well

09/14/2021

Week 24: I Think I Heard Something
Project: Shoot an Out of Focus Photo Well

Getting back into the swing of things after recovering from Hurricane Ida, we’ve got a challenge about taking a photo that’s intentionally out of focus and making it work. And this time around I wanted to subvert the expectation of the out-of-focus photo a bit and play around with the parameters of what it could mean. I’ve seen some brilliant out-of-focus photos that work really well: Photos that give a sense of movement, passing, transition, urgency. You get the idea.

Gina and I charging our phones while listening to the radio for news.

But with Hurricane Ida fresh in my mind, there was a moment during the hurricane that kinda stuck with me that I wanted to call back. See, we’ve got these stray cats that come around the house. We care for them greatly; we feed them; we pet them; I’ve made little cat houses in the shed with a small heater during the winter season. So, when the hurricane came through I was a bit concerned for all these cats. Unfortunately, our house cat doesn’t like having these stray cats around–especially not coming inside. One cat in particular, Clytemnestra, will come around in the morning and afternoon to get fed. Lately she’s been hanging around a bit more often. Well, when the hurricane started to crank up, we weren’t able to find Clytems anywhere. We kept looking out the window for her every so often. When the lights went off I’d shine a light all around outside hoping to see her. I didn’t care if our cat didn’t like it, I was going to scoop Clytems up and bring her inside. Well, once the hurricane started to really bear down and the lights had been off for a while, I started to get worried for the strays.

I went to go to the bathroom and that’s when I heard it.

Clytemnestra has a very tiny, very dainty meow. But I heard it from where I was inside the house. It was faint but I heard it.

I looked out the window and there she was, little Clytems was under my car and she was freaking out. She didn’t know where to go. Usually, being under the car protects her from the rain but in this case the wind and rain was everywhere.

I put on my raincoat and ran out to try and get her. The thing is Clytems is very skittish. Even after a couple of years of being around us she’ll still get skittish and run off. But I had to get her out from under my car. She just wouldn’t come to me when I called her.

I actually got filled with a bit of panic. I had to get her inside.

I just spoke calmly to her, motioned for her to come over, and eventually she came over to me. When she got close enough I scooped her up and ran her inside. She freaked out a bit cause she initially felt trapped but after about an hour she calmed down and settled in for the night.
That was a long night.

So, no, this week’s challenge isn’t some out-of-focus fashion shoot with a long-exposure twirling dress. It’s me keeping vigilant at a window until I caught sight of that little stray cat I wanted to keep safe during a storm. The out-of-focus element is caused by the type of glass and long exposure as opposed to missing focus on the correct point of interest. I wanted the glass to be in focus, my hand on the glass to be in focus, but have that same glass cause the rest of me to be out of focus. It’s a long exposure as well which allow me to move my head and hands into different places to give the sense of passing time.

Week 25: Use a Black Light

09/20/2021

Week 25: Entropy
Project: Use a Black Light

I have to be honest, I’m not a big fan of black light photography. It all looks the same to me and everyone pretty much does the same stuff with it. I’ve seen some pretty cool stuff here and there but it’s rare to find something appealing. I guess in order for me to get excited about it I would really need to hire a hair and makeup person to bang out a good job. However, I had to use what I had on hand. But for this week’s challenge I tried to make the best of it and explore some of my options on what could be done with a black light.

I went to the local party store and pretty much bought everything they had that would glow under a black light. I just didn’t have a good idea of what I wanted to do.

I had some old Christmas tree cotton fluff that I bundled up and tacked to the wall for clouds. Behind those clouds I put these portable black lights that you would normally use in some classroom to examine fingerprints. This ended up looking pretty cool. So, the fluffy clouds you see were actually captured in camera.

The rest of the shoot didn’t go very smoothly. I gathered up as many black lights as I could but they just don’t provide a lot of light. The backdrop was a simple black sheet with a white sheet bundled up on the floor. I sprayed glow-in-the-dark aerosol paint on the black sheet to create the appearance of stars.

The paint job just wasn’t what I had in mind. Maybe I got the wrong type of paint; maybe I should’ve diluted the paint with water; maybe I should’ve gotten a different application brush. I don’t know but it wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do so I resorted to flicking it on Gina with my fingers. This created globs of paint and resulted in everything looking like a half-ass Jackson Pollock painting.

I did, however, plan to wrap her in orange plastic wrap from the beginning and this ended up looking quite nice. It kinda looked like a mini-skirt and top that could reveal the paint underneath.
After all the shoot I had maybe two shots that I actually kinda liked. But overall, it just wasn’t a fun shoot and I’m not crazy about the results. A big letdown. But you know what, onward and upwards.

Week 26: Use a Lensbaby or Tilt-Shift Lens

09/30/2021

Week 26: Boudoir
Project: Use a Lensbaby or Tilt-Shift Lens

This week’s challenge asked to use either a Lensbaby or tilt-shift lens…two things I don’t have. “But, Jay. You can just rent one.” Well, you know what, I’ve never rented a lens and I don’t really feel like hunting it down, waiting a week for it to arrive, figuring out how to use it, then packaging it up to send it back. Nurts to that. “But, Jay. Why not ask a friend to borrow their tilt-shift lens?” I don’t know any person well enough to borrow their gear. So, I decided to fake the look of it in post-production. Basically, the look I was going for was the selective focus of the Lensbaby-type lens. I’ve never used them before but from the examples I’ve seen it has this main area of concentrated focus and the rest has this specific type of blur. That blur might be a radial blur, or a zoom blur, etc., you get the idea. The purpose, however, is to draw your attention to a specific area of the frame.

So, that’s what I went for.Now, I’ve never really done a proper boudoir shoot, but Gina wanted to do one. She had some specific poses in mind, which was fine by me. Posing isn’t my strong suit and I was more focused on getting this high contrast, dramatic lighting. I knew I wanted to go black and white and have it looking very stark, almost claustrophobic.

The first shot was in the bathroom. I put a small Godox strobe to her right and a larger softbox outside the room and by the camera. I wanted to side light her but also get the curves of her butt. Something wasn’t working at first so I moved the Godox light inside the bathroom and adjusted it so it was just behind her and aimed at the mirror. This way, the light would illuminate her side profile and would bounce off the mirror to light her face. The strobe on the outside did a fine job catching her back but not lighting it enough to fully illuminate everything. I just wanted to catch her calf muscles, her butt, and a portion of her back. It was a tricky shot cause I had to turn off all the lights for this type of lighting effect. That meant, focusing the shot, turning off the lights, taking the picture, and checking the expression. So, really what you’re seeing here is 100% strobe lights in a very small space.

The rest of the shots used a combination of either one strobe and a mirror or two strobes.

The main focus for this type of shoot was to accent curves and create triangles. The cat even got involved at one point–always a welcome addition.

The blur for the main shot of the challenge was achieved during the last part of post-processing. Once I got the entire image looking the way I liked it, I added a radial blur to a stamp visible layer above all the other layers. I then added a mask and selectively painted in the areas of blur. I wanted more blur on the edges of her legs and have that taper off the closer it got to her face. So, it’s almost like a field blur with a radial effect.

I didn’t bother doing this to every single picture. I’m including the rest of the shots from this session here to show how the rest of the shoot went. If you like what you see, go follow Gina on her Instagram page: @ginakaos

Week 27: Shoot a Frame Within a Frame

10/05/2021

Week 27: Collective Isolation
Project: Shoot a Frame Within a Frame

I have a strip of 75mm film I use for a bookmark and recently I was admiring just how damn cool it was. And then I was walking past these windows that look out upon the Mississippi River levee. In a way, this section of windows, framed by the support poles, reminded me of that 75mm film strip.

There’s a lot of foot traffic on the levee towards sunset. Some people are exercising and running; some are on a date and enjoying some time together; other people are just out and about with family or by themselves, enjoying the day. So, if you stop for a while and just watch out the window you can see all sorts of interactions

People, for the most part, tend to mind their own business. It’s why we can go out to a restaurant with a loved one and pretend that we’re not in a big room with dozens of other couples also pretending that no one else is around. When I set up my camera to take these pictures I decided to capture little frames of people minding their own business. So, no, I didn’t want to “Shoot a Frame Within a Frame” using shadows or doorways; I wanted to use the entire wall of windows as a frame to separate interactions, use the lower section of windows to frame individuals going about their business while ignoring others, the upper part of the windows to frame birds flying together in batches, frame all the windows with the support poles on both sides, and finally frame all of that within the context of 75mm mounting guides.

This was shot on a Ricoh GRiii and I knew I would have to extend this scene out in post to make a really big picture to illustrate the story. The final image was about 12000 pixels long which I had to scale down for the web.

Out of all the pictures I was able to catch one interaction between two strangers. Try and find it. It’s of a man handing a Bible to a woman he randomly decided to talk to.

Week 28: Shoot a Very Low-Key Image

10/14/2021

Week 28: Cailleach
Project: Shoot a Very Low-Key Image

Low-key in photography doesn’t mean relaxed, chilled out, and soft spoken. Low-key simply means that the emphasis is on the shadows, on the darks. Whereas high-key is all bright and damn near blown out, low-key has crushed blacks and is all mysterious. Perfect for getting close to Halloween, right?

Well, Gina was shooting a video for an upcoming belly dance gathering and was dressed like a witchy crone named Cailleach, a divine hag and Queen of Winter. She had a cool twiggy head band and some matching make-up; plus, we just finished watching this movie, Censor, which had this cool lighting theme all throughout. So, we decided to shoot this low-key image and video using only colored video lights…no strobes. The lighting was inspired by Censor and another movie called Mandy. Both movies are worth checking out.

This whole thing was a challenge because I really wanted to utilize the sharpness and look that I get with my 70-200 lens, a lens that really wants a lot of light.

I set up two GVM video lights and a smaller LED light to the right of the frame, set to a pink color. I then set one GVM video light and an LED bar light set to aqua to the left. The emphasis would be on the pink light. Behind me, I set up my big work lights and put colored gells on them, pointing them to the extreme left and right of the room to bounce off the walls. I also used a small Godox strobe with a snoot attached to make her eyes pop and to reveal the green of her eyes.

Week 29: Shoot a Very High-Key Image

10/19/2021

Week 29: Work Viking
Project: Shoot a Very High-Key Image

High-key photography, damn near blowing out your image with copious amounts of light. Make your subject look like a pretty angel coming through heaven’s gate or something.

For this image I wanted to do a slight combination of high-key with low-key elements. By that, I mean, I wanted to put some form of viking face paint on the upper part of my face so I could later overlay an image of stars, the galaxy, or something of that nature. I wasn’t quite sure what yet. My girlfriend helped me with the makeup and even did an initial splatter spray of white on my forehead for texture and added pizzazz.

I wanted to wear a suit for this because you usually don’t see vikings in suits and I wanted to be a Work Viking…Assistant to the Regional Viking.

To make the blown out effect I hung up a white sheet in a doorway. Behind that sheet I put two softboxes with two 100 watt bulbs each to the side. I put two large LED worklights down a bit lower. Finally, I put a small strobe light right below where my head would be.

On the other side (where I’d be standing), I set up my camera and put a Godox 600pro strobe right above the camera and angled to the right to illuminate more of one side of my face. I then put a black negative fill to my left to darken that side of my face so only one eye would pop bright.

This took a fair amount of experimentation but when I do this sort of thing I use a 6′ tall mannequin named Sasha to stand in for me. With Sasha I can move my lights around and pre-focus my camera.

That’s about it, folks.

Week 30: Create a Lens Flare

11/10/2021

Week 30: The Raven
Project: Create a Lens Flare

For the last couple of weeks I got extremely busy. Not that I’m complaining or anything, I just had a lot of paid gigs come my way that required a ton of editing. After getting all that stuff out of the way I was freed up to get back into the challenges. That brings me to Week 30: Create a Lens Flare

Originally, I wanted to shoot this outside but it seemed like every single day that I was free to shoot the sky outside looked like garbage. So, I opted to shoot this in my kitchen, with a white sheet behind Gina, and a big strobe light right over her shoulder. The idea was to put the strobe over her shoulder so that the bulb was slightly in view. When I shot, the bright light would flare out and wash out the majority of the image. To combat her face being washed out or in shadow, I added a second strobe to my camera right to light up her face.

The idea behind this image came from a book a wrote a while back called “Down Past the Arbored Way.” It dealt with a character walking into a city with a reluctant companion by his side. The companion had been dogging our protagonist from quite some time, cheating their way to be ahead. This cheater was depicted as a frail male figure and covered in raven feathers for hair. I was going to shoot Gina’s headshot for this and replace her eyes with my eyes but decided to just use Gina as the character as this wasn’t a direct take from the book but more of an homage. The scene was about how the two were walking into a desolate city and the main character looks over to his companion and sees a look on their face that couldn’t quite be placed. It was like a Mona Lisa moment. Was the smile and the look appreciative and affectionate or was there a level of deceit at play?

Here’s a small video breakdown on how I made this in Photoshop:

Week 31: Use a Gel

11/18/2021

Week 31: Man About Town
Project: Use a Gel

I always wanted to take a picture of myself captured in the side mirror of my car. I don’t know where that came from or why it stuck with me. I just know that one day I was sitting in my car, looked over at myself, and thought, “why hasn’t any band taken photos of their members in car mirrors?”

So, tonight I finally got around to it.

In keeping with the theme of the challenge I used three constant lights with colored gels. I found the red light I wanted to use on the outside to simulate a business light or brake lights and went on Adobe’s color wheel site to find a Triad complementary color set to go along with it. Obviously, from looking at the catch lights in my eyes you can see that one was red and off to the driver side of the car, the other one was pointing at me through the passenger side window with the window rolled down. Behind me I put a third light to simulate car lights in the distance. This color was an LED light and set to a bright orange/yellow hue.

Now, to take this shot I had to use my Arsenal device which I rarely use. Since I was basically taking a selfie and had to focus on my reflection and not on the surface of the mirror, I used the Arsenal device to look at what I was doing from inside my car. I set the device to manual cause I didn’t trust what it would do in “Smart” mode. Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out what it wants to do and in “Smart” mode it kept focusing on the surface of the mirror itself and not on my face.

I processed the image in such a way to look cinematic and dramatic and the end result kinda surprised me.

Week 32: Light Paint with Fiber Optics

11/24/2021

photo using optic fiber — Week 32: Fiber Optics
Project: Light Paint with Fiber Optics

I’ll be perfectly honest with you. This week’s challenge was supposed to be “Shoot with a Wide Angle Lens” but after getting halfway through these challenges I’m getting a little burned out. I shoot with a wide angle lens all the time when doing stuff for the planetarium but I’m pretty sure the challenge is meant for a portrait. Look, I understand the point of it and everything, I just couldn’t be bothered with doing yet another portrait with some different lens type. On top of that but I see the following weeks challenge is to shoot a portrait at some extreme angle.

With all that out of the way, I did want to stick with the “Lindsay Adler inspired” theme to keep things somewhat in line with the challenge. She recently posted a photo from a session she did using fiber optic brushes. I thought it looked so cool I just went out and bought a deluxe started pack from Light Painting Brushes.

The kit comes with (and I’m not getting paid to say this) three universal light connectors to attach to a flash light (one is included but I bought a second one), a black fiber optic wand, a white fiber optic wand, a collapsible light saber, a plexiglass rectangle wand, and a set of colored light pen attachments.

For the images I’ve included here I used a combination of the white fiber optic wand and the black wand. I also would unattach the fiber optic wand and paint the background with a red filter. I’m including a video tutorial on how all this works as well as a Photoshop walkthru with how I did it all.

It was quite an arduous task, actually. I think we were at it for a few hours. Basically, since it’s long exposure, your subject has to remain very still. I’m talking about 20 to 30 second long exposures here. I just put the camera on “Bulb” mode and used a remote shutter release to signal the camera’s shutter to open and hit it again to close the shutter when I was done painting. But you pose the subject, focus the camera, turn out the lights, get in position to paint, signal the shutter, do your light painting, signal the shutter to close, then check what you got.

A lot of the trail-and-error came down to how fast you moved the wand and fiber optics down the body. The black fiber optic wand was best to create those streak effects because only the tips of the fiber optics would light up and reacted best directly on the skin. The white fiber optic wand would light the whole place up and would create this ethereal glowing effect. That’s what I used to create the “Light Waterfall” effect and the light water in this picture to the below.

I hung up a black curtain behind Gina and painted it with a red flashlight when I was done painting on the body. I always knew I could replace it in post though.

The real cool thing I did that I can impart to anyone reading this is the use of gels on the flashlight itself. See, the flashlight attaches to the universal connector and the connector basically attaches the light painting brush to the flashlight. So, what I did was cut out some little squares, circles, and triangles, and then put the little gel cut outs on tape. I then taped those pieces of colored gels to the flashlight. Then I had all these colored lights in different areas of the fiber optics. That’s how I was able to get the different colored lights in the close-up image below.

There’s definitely an art to doing light painting. The concept is easy enough but any mistake or flick of the wrist will ruin what you’re trying to do. I did a couple of attempts at light painting with the colored fiber optics then switching out to use the light saber wand at the end. I’d seen people use it to create shapes behind the subject so I tried to do a simple circle pattern. The image itself was okay but the circle certainly isn’t perfectly straight. I’m not super proud of it but this is my first attempt at doing a circle pattern with a light saber in long exposure. Sure, I could’ve spent a lot of time going in there and liquifying the circles to get everything perfect but I just wasn’t super excited about the image from the start.

All in all, I think light painting with fiber optic brushes looks really cool and I think I might be able to come up with something better for it in the future. Below is a brief tutorial where I walk through how the brushes work and my Photoshop workflow.

Week 33: Shoot At an Extreme Angle

11/30/2021

photograph at an extreme angle — Week 33: Use Your Words
Project: Shoot At an Extreme Angle

When I was thinking about this challenge I was also doing some research for an essay I was writing about the collaborations between Salvador Dali and Philippe Halsman. In one shot, I saw a picture of Dali immersing his face in a fish tank full of water while Halsman took his photo from underneath the glass bottom. I thought that was pretty cool and worth exploring. Plus, what more of an extreme angle than facing directly upwards and shooting through water?

For the shot I had in mind, I needed two key ingredients: 1) a fish tank that wasn’t too expensive, and 2) fake blood.

Maybe I was inspired by the cover to Dead By April’s “Incomparable” album but, if so, it was more subconscious because I didn’t think of that album until I was half way into editing. In any case, the idea here was to shoot me from below with my head in water and blood trickling out of my mouth. And, if that failed, I would shoot from the side and rotate the image in some unnatural way.

I guess I’m in the process of making a whole project based on violence.

The fish tank was bought from Walmart for just $15. Quite a good deal. The fake blood was made out of corn syrup (the clear kind), red food coloring, a drop of blue food coloring, some liquid coffee creamer, and a bit of water to thin it down. The recipe I used was the one I got from the Evil Dead book on how they made their special effects.

I put the fish tank on my saw horses because I wasn’t about to trust stools or TV trays to prop it up. I needed the support base to be super sturdy and I needed room underneath to put the camera.

The problem was that when the camera was positioned underneath the fish tank, I couldn’t look through the viewfinder or look at the back of the camera to focus. I used a Manfrotto 055 four-section tripod which allows the middle column to come up and out at a 90 degree angle so you can shoot down at or up on something. I couldn’t rely on autofocus because it would probably try to focus on the bottom of the glass. So, I used my Arsenal AI attachment which would allow me to look at what the camera was seeing by using my phone. The Arsenal device allowed me to focus on my fingers when I dipped them into the tank–I needed something mid-way into the water to pre-focus so I used my hand. Then, I locked down focus, disconnected the Arsenal, attached my wireless trigger and went for it. My girlfriend helped me out by holding down the shutter release. The shutter was set to rapid fire and my strobes were set to high-speed sync.

I didn’t like the end result so I tried to shoot from the side. The first go was unsuccessful because of all the bubbles on the side of the glass and the lights were poorly positioned to accent the bubbles and not the blood or skin. So, I had to reset once again and try it all over. The third attempt got me some good shots worth using.

Here’s a peak at the image shot from underneath. I’m not super hot on it.

Here’s a video of my Photoshop workflow.

Week 34: Shoot a Wide Angle Portrait

12/18/2021

creative 52, wide angle portrait — Week 34: Happy Hallidays
Project: Shoot a Wide Angle Portrait

I don’t know why I was dreading the “Shoot a Wide Angle Portrait” challenge so much. It just seemed dull to me. Slap on a wide angle lens and shoot a portrait. Got it. Of course, the challenge is to be creative with it. You have to make the wide angle perspective play into the portrait’s theme.

So, I couldn’t quite think of something cool for this.
If you’ve seen my past posts I’ve talked about skipping it completely.

Since I didn’t flip ahead in the Creative 52 book, I didn’t see that light painting was already in there at Week 34. Well, I’d already done a light painting portrait. So, I guess that meant I had to just go back and do a wide angle portrait. Gah.

Well, the holidays came around and I got very busy with shoots and work. A week went by and I didn’t shoot anything for myself. Then another week went by. Then, Gina had an opportunity to do a belly dancing gig down in the French Quarter of New Orleans. I drove her down there to make sure everything would be okay.

I always get stressed with going to New Orleans. You can never find a parking spot, the traffic is awful, getting around is a pain, and whenever I’m with someone I just get this heightened protective Papa Bear mentality. I basically can’t enjoy myself.

But we got to the gig, which was at this condo, and there was this long brick hallway leading into the courtyard. It was great. Just a long, narrow, brick hallway that screamed French Quarter. And by that, I mean, nothing was symmetrical, it looked like the bricks were added on top of each other year after year and built up over time, and the ground is always uneven everywhere you go. At the end of the hallway was a bubble machine and Christmas lights. I took one look at it and just knew it would be perfect for the wide angle shot.

I told Gina to just stand in the middle of the brick hallway and touch the sides. I got down low and shot at the widest setting. This really emphasized the walls and the leading lines. It was a tough shot though since it was late at night, the ambient light was quite low, and my one wide angle lens isn’t exactly very fast…f/4 being the widest aperture.

But you know what, it’s pretty cool. I’m glad I didn’t completely get rid of this challenge at all.

Week 35: Project Onto Your Subject

12/24/2021

I guess I have a resting mean face. I hear that a lot.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“You look mad.”
“That’s just my face.”

So, when the challenge came up for “projecting onto a subject” I thought I would use the phrase in a literal and figurative path. A play on how people project their negativity and insecurities onto others. The point of all this is a response to how people, and not just people online, feel the need to chime in with what others are doing in their own endeavors. Whether you’re a musician, a painter, a poet, a photographer, a dancer, a whatever, you put your creative work out into the world with the hope that there are other people that think your stuff is pretty cool. Of course, this invites the advice of anyone and everyone; reasonable people and maniacs.

Every creative person has to learn how to deal with not only critique but also with malicious personal attacks.

Of course, it goes without saying that people from all walks of life must deal with this as well. Not just creative people.

I remember back when I first started recording demo tapes with my band, Cea Serin. We were recording these demo tapes to send out for reviews with the hope to generate some interest in our band and record labels would come knocking. It was my first time singing lead vocals and I did the best I could for the time. I certainly was no Geoff Tate but the recordings we got were me at my best and I was reasonably proud of the finished product. I knew there were flaws; I knew it wasn’t perfect. So, when the good reviews came in, I was happy that they liked it; however, when a review came in that said they didn’t like the vocals, I felt crushed.

I felt crushed because I knew that someone out there saw through it. They saw through the effects and the mix and heard something they didn’t like. I knew I didn’t fool that person.

So, as the years went along and the recordings got better, I became more confident in the performances. I got to the point where I was 99.9% happy with everything we committed to tape. Then, if a bad review came out, I felt unfazed. I was so sure of myself and what we had recorded, no amount of bad opinions could sway my own opinion.

It’s not what they think, it’s what you know.

Everyone is going to have that grace period in their life when they start something new. You just have to push through it and realize that anyone talking shit to you is just unhappy with themselves and projecting their own insecurities. You also must realize that the same maniacs throwing a fit in public for no reason also have access to the internet and can say whatever they want as well. Not every opinion in print is as valid as the next.

If you start going to the gym to get in shape, who cares if people are looking at you. You’re there for you, not them.
If you post a project you’ve worked hard on and someone hates your color grading. Fuck ’em. Maybe they’re right, but you’ll get better in time. They don’t know where you’re at in your journey.

You gotta push past the learning phase and be able to brush off the awful people that can’t think of anything better to do than tear others down. Once you’ve learned what you need to make your craft a reality, sharpen your skills until you’re as close to 100% happy with it as you can be. Then, no amount of criticism will phase you. Look above the words, look above the insecurities others project onto you, keep your eyes set on your goal.

Anyone talking shit doesn’t have your best interest at heart. They just want to make themselves feel better for their own shortcomings. Whatever vile shit a person says about you, know they’re just projecting onto you. They feel bad about themselves, so they want you to feel bad about yourself.

Know what it is so you can call it out for what it is and deal with it for what it is.

Week 36: Break a Lighting Rule

01/10/2022

Week 36: Surrounded
Project: Break a Lighting Rule

For the last two weeks I was sidelined with Covid-19: The Revenge. Yes, I had two vaccines and even signed up for my booster shot. But the day after scheduling that booster I started to feel the tinglings of symptoms. A couple of days later I was feeling pretty bad. I had some pretty bad muscle and joint pain which made it very uncomfortable to sleep. That went away after a few days but was followed by a pretty bad cold and cough. I took a test at the local CVS and sure enough, it came back positive. So, needless to say, I didn’t exactly feel like doing any photo projects at all.
But now I’m back into the swing of things.

This week’s challenge deals with breaking a lighting rule. Sure, there’s side lighting, cross lighting, and there’s the lighting rules that deal with how shadows should fall across a woman’s face as compared to how shadows should fall across a man’s face. Since photography literally means “light writing” you can imagine that over the years the learned experts have come up with quite a laundry list of rules. Well, one rule I always knew about before ever getting into photography was Don’t Light People From Beneath.

I remember back in the day when I was a roadie for a traveling stripper (a “feature entertainer”), we got to a club that had a plexiglass dance stage. The dancers’ lighting came entirely from under this stage and through the plexiglass. The dancers hated it. It’s like when you tell a scary campfire story and you put the flashlight under your chin to make you look all creepy. That’s what lighting a subject from below does. It causes unflattering and harsh shadows that you don’t really want.

So that’s the rule I wanted to break. The solution to making this work was to simulate a chaotic, dance club, party environment where balloons were catching the light from beneath and bouncing it all around. I got a helium tank, some balloons, some duct tape, and some Luna Lovegood glasses and went to town.
The lights I used were LED video lights positioned directly below, pointing up, and dialed in with complimentary colors to the balloons. The balloons made the light soft, got rid of the harsh shadow lines, and looked festive as all hell.

Week 37: Shoot Through a Crystal

01/19/2022

Week 37: Astral Projection
Project: Shoot Through a Crystal

A couple of years back I was going through the Antique Village here in my little city. It’s an old part of town that used to be home to a movie theater, a bank, and some little shops. At one point it all shut down until, for some reason, everyone decided to convert every single store into an antique shop. Well, antique shops are great places to hunt for photography props. And it just so happened that while I was visiting one, I picked up a handful of chandelier crystals cause I thought they would be cool to shoot through. Normally, I don’t like that kind of stuff. I don’t like having an expensive lens and shooting through some cloudy, shitty, cheap piece of glass…but whatever. It’s fun on a lark, right?

Well, for this challenge I decided to ramp things up. Instead of just shooting through crystal I also shot through a few more things. I went to Wal-Mart and bought some mirror tabletop pieces. I taped and glued them together into a triangle. I did the same thing with some pieces of red glass normally used for stage lighting. It just so happened that the red triangle box fit inside the mirror one. When combining these two together it creates an interesting effect.

With that little structure I strung up some crystals on one end and taped the whole thing onto the head of a spare tripod. Then I put a thin layer of pink gel at the other end.

Following all that, I lit the whole scene with two strobes. The key light had a purple gel attached to the strobe head and the fill light had a red gel attached. The idea was to change the colors in post to complimentary colors since I didn’t have the exact colors at my disposal.

Well, that was all the easy part. The hard part was situating Gina in one spot, adjusting the triangle box to her height, then adjusting the camera in just the right angle. Then I had to mess around with the crystals to get them in just the right position so you could not only see Gina but get a satisfactory effect. I managed to take multiple shots with the crystals being in just the right spot to make this cool tear drop pattern, repeating her face over and over towards the top.

It ended up looking almost like a movie poster. I added some elements in after-the-face to hide the panties and some background stuff I didn’t like, but overall it was a pretty cool effect.

Week 38: Make Blending Modes Your Best Friend

01/24/2022

Week 38: Oceans Above
Project: Make Blend Modes Your Best Friend

Now we’re starting to get into the Photoshop area of things, which for me is the real fun stuff. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to be able to work with someone and capture a certain image in-camera, but the editing process for me is where the creative process really takes off.

For this challenge, we’re dealing with Blend Modes in Photoshop. So, the photo can be anything as long as you creatively use Blend Modes to bring it to life. Blend Modes can be used for a very wide variety of things, but typically you see them used for double exposures. You can use Blend Modes to create color toning, dodging and burning, creating reflections, etc. etc.

Now, I’ve already made an image like this before, but I used stock imagery back when I was learning the ropes in Photoshop and wanted to use my own photo this time. With that, I posed and shot my girlfriend using fairly flat lighting, i.e. the strobe light was right above my camera and behind me. I wanted to manually sculpt in the shadows depending upon how the flesh interacted with the water waves. This was quite an involved edit, actually. There was lots of dodging and burning to emphasize the three-dimensional contours of the body and then that process would be repeated to play up the interaction with the waves. I used color toning to bring out complimentary colors of the waters and tones in the shadows. I also did something I didn’t use before: I used lots of Field Blur pins to establish areas with no blur and add blur to the trough areas within the curvatures. This heightened the dimensionality of it.

Come up with a meaning for this and leave me a message in the comments. I like it so much I’ll be making a large 30×30 print for my house.

Week 39: Get Creative with Photoshop Brushes

01/31/2022

Week 39: Clytemnestra
Project: Get Creative with Photoshop Brushes

You know, I really wanted to take a break from taking photos of people for a change and use this challenge to highlight a stray cat named Clytemnestra. This little gal has been coming around our house for a couple of years now and we’ve been taking care of her. We’ve brought her to the vet to get all checked out and vaccinated. I made her a little kitty cat hotel outside our back door for her to be warm at night–equipped with heated blankets, cover, and food.

The thing is, she refuses to stay inside the house. We’ve been trying for the longest time to get her to come live inside but she freaks out when we close the door. The same can be said about taking pictures. I tried to have Gina hold her up so I could take a picture of her but she was just squirming around and not looking at me. So, plan B was to just go outside, pet her, and finally get a shot of her looking into camera. It took a while, but I managed to get this one good shot of her looking straight on at me.

That being said, this challenge is about getting creative with Photoshop brushes. With that, I wanted to make a watercolor painting with special brushes and not use any special filters that do all the work for you.

After making my initial adjustments, I made a rough selection around Clytems. I then used the Smudge tool to smudge the colors but I varied the size of the brush to match the fur, blur, whiskers, etc: larger areas got a large radius, smaller areas with finer detail got a very small brush. After that, I used a watercolor brush to add detail, make the edges look more like a watercolor painting, bring back color from the background, refine detail from the original image, and so on. Then I used a dedicated sketch brush to fake sketch lines an artist would make to mark up where the subject would be placed in the frame. I then used the lasso tool and white fill dialogue to create those areas of scratches and irregularities you see in watercolor prints sometimes. It’s a tedious process but the finished result does Clytemnestra justice.

Week 40: Use an “Incorrect” White Balance

02/13/2022

Week 40: Plastic Bath
Project: Use an “Incorrect” White Balance

When it comes to white balance in post processing, you’re basically telling the software what is supposed to be “white” (or 50% grey) so all the other colors can move in a certain direction to make that certain point actually appear white. It helps keep skin tones correct and the environment look right. However, you can use white balance creatively to elicit a certain vibe to your image. Think of the movie Underworld. That whole movie looks blue. That blue tone makes everything seem very cold and dreary. That’s essentially messing with the images “temperature.” You can warm up your image by moving colors more to the yellow/orange end of the spectrum or you can cool the image down by adding a blue. It’s actually a good way to add blue to an overexposed sky: just isolate the brightest part of image, being the sky, and adjust the white balance towards blue.

That’s what I was going for in this image. Just a monochromatic blue image.

My initial idea was to have a “Who Killed Laura Palmer” thing going on with a woman wrapped in plastic. I basically wanted to see how crinkly plastic would look when side lit with blue lights. Would the peaks catch the light like water?

I put down a white comforter and cut up a lot of clear plastic bags into sheets. I put 5 constant lights set to various shades of blue to the left and right, then I put a strobe with a snoot attached and aimed it at her face. I also used a larger strobe with a blue gel to help light the entire scene.

Week 41: Take Control of Color in Photoshop

02/16/2022

Week 41: Infrared City
Project: Take Control of Color in Photoshop

I really like the look of how infrared filters in photography. Is it overdone? I don’t know. But it makes everything familiar seem foreign. For example, it changes the greens of leaves into pinks and deep reds but not in an Autumn kind of way. The downside is when you apply an infrared filter to an image it also changes the color of the sky and anything else—it gives it this otherworldy look.

When it came to this challenge, I knew I wanted to do an infrared image with trees and grass in some way. But I’d already done that quite a bit. So, I headed downtown and snapped several shots that could be decent contenders for an infrared image. When I got to the capitol, I noticed they had just cut the grass, and everything looked well-manicured. I positioned myself far in front of the statue and made sure everything was lined up in a symmetrical way.

I didn’t think this image would be the one I’d use but when I got into Photoshop and started manipulating the colors, I started to really like what I saw.

Things started to look like a snapshot from something out of the Wizard of Oz. That reminded me of the hot air balloon scene from Sam Raimi’s movie, so I put some of those in there as well. You can’t go wrong with balloons. That being said, I decided to use a dynamic symmetry grid to strategically place the balloons. Not that anyone would notice, but I think it arranges things in a nice way.

In order to get around the change in sky color and building color, I duplicated the main layer and isolated just the buildings to mask them out. I then simply replaced the sky with something that would suit the shadows and angles of the balloons.

The end result looks like some vintage snapshot of some land far away ruled over by a happy wizard-inventor.

Week 42: Create a Lens Flare in Photoshop

02/22/2022

Week 42: Light Painting 2
Project: Create a Lens Flare in Photoshop

Lens flare is something photographers typically try to avoid; however, there are some that have made a career off having stylized lens flare as part of their look. Personally, I like lens flare. I like when someone gets shot in a movie and the blood splatters against the camera lens, too. Something about having an effect that acknowledges the camera is actually there just looks cool to me.

For this challenge, I could certainly have gone back and grabbed some old photo to slap a lens flare overlay on. But I wanted to start from scratch. I also didn’t like the last light painting photo I made. I couldn’t quite figure out what I was doing wrong. All the images were all a tad blurry. Then, I realized I should’ve been using a strobe.

This is just one image in a set of images. I was recently approached to do a series devoted to women’s breasts. Breasts of all types, shapes, sizes, ages, etc. etc. I’ll talk more about that later but for right now, this is one of the shots I can actually share here.

Of course, in line with the challenge, the lens flare was added in post but I did make sure to aim the wand at the camera lens to get a nice burst or two of over exposure.

Week 43: Defy Gravity

03/07/2022

Week 43: Floating Basses
Project: Defy Gravity

If it’s one thing that could seriously sideline me in keeping up with these challenges and staying consistent, it’s getting a kidney stone.

Towards the end of February, I felt a sharp pain below my stomach. This was right after lunch so I figured I might’ve gotten food poisoning. However, besides feeling sick to my stomach, I felt very dizzy. I ended up going home a bit early and matters just got worse and worse. I ended up going to the emergency room where I found out I had a 7mm kidney stone in my right kidney. Not only that, but I have a second one waiting to descend in my left as well. Fun times.

They sent me home with pain meds and set me up for surgery.

Well, the surgery didn’t go so well and they weren’t able to get the stone out. So, I’m scheduled to go back next week.

All that being said, I didn’t have a lot of time nor the energy to keep up with the Creative 52 challenge. Lucky for me, the challenges at this point are more centered around Photoshop techniques. This week’s challenge deals with “defying gravity,” or levitation. And when it comes to levitation photography, I typically see the same stuff over and over again: a person leaning back on a stool and then taking the stool out in post, or floating food which is really just falling and frozen in frame.

I wanted to do something a little different than all that and I didn’t want to deal with people this week. So, I used three of my “go to” bass guitars. My Conklin GTBD-7, my MTD AG5, and my MTD Kingston Z fretless bass. But I also wanted to create elements that floated behind the instruments as well.

I created a wall with these colored floating mirrors in Blender. It’s really just a series of planes with textures and colors assigned to them. I made sure the wall and the mirrors had complementary colors to the main Conklin bass. I then took photos of the front and back of each bass by simply holding them up by the headstock, erasing my fingers later in post. I took pics of the back side of the basses cause I knew I wanted them to reflect in the colored mirrors and I’d have to add that in manually.

Tricky and fun shoot that didn’t put too much stress on me while still recovering.

Week 44: Add Texture

03/16/2022

Week 44: Among the Trees
Project: Add Texture

Family photoshoots can be tricky. You gotta get everyone warmed up, wrangled together, synched up with you and your methods. Everyone’s gotta be looking at you, not blinking, not sneezing, not grimacing. It’s tricky. Especially when small kids are involved. Kids want to do their own thing. They wanna play, run around, and they get bored easily. I, for one, don’t know how to handle kids. I’ve never had kids and I’m rarely ever around them. But sometimes when kids wander off during shoots it can be a good thing.

It’s an opportunity to catch them exploring, checking out their new environment, and to possibly catch some cool candid moments. During this particular shoot, the youngest was walking around a tree with low hanging limbs. He knew I was kind of following him around so he was hiding behind leaves and limbs. After several shots of me trying to catch some candids, he rested his arms and head on one of those low hanging branches and looked right at me. And that was the shot.

It reminded me of one by Steve McCurry. “Boy in his father’s truck on a coffee farm.” Initially, I chose to go black and white with this one because I think if color has nothing to do with the photo then it’s best to remove it all together. In this case, the most important aspects of the image, to me at least, is the subframing with the branches, the eyes, and the light. After all, it suits the challenge this week which deals with adding texture to an image. But ultimately, the version I like best would be the color version because the green grass, red hair, and blue eyes with blue sweater just all work so well together.

As far as the challenge goes, adding texture to an image can serve various functions. You can add a paper texture to make the image look more vintage; you can add text or drawings over an image; you can add a canvas texture to accentuate a painterly look. In the case of this challenge, I added two textures: a chemical wash texture and a paper texture. I wanted the image to look like it was found in some old photo album or pressed within the pages of a book somewhere.

Week 45: Play With Cutouts

03/22/2022

Week 45: Slice Poster
Project: Play With Cutouts

When I was a kid, I was all about some horror movies. I loved Friday the 13, Halloween, Slumber Party Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, you name it. If it had a crazy serial killer with an interesting weapon, I was there. And as a kid, I’d watch these movies with my best-friend-at-the-time during sleepovers. We’d go out to the local video store and rent some random horror movie with a cool box cover. One night we were eating pizza and he remarked that a pizza cutter would be a cool weapon for a crazed killer. That stuck with me.

Now, every time I cut a pizza up, I think of him saying that and I think of a pizza slicer as a masked murderer’s weapon-of-choice.

This week’s challenge is all about playing with cutouts. When I was doing research on this—looking up artists known for creatively using cutouts in Photoshop—I tried to avoid doing what they were all doing. The first idea that came to mind was the original Friday the 13^th poster. And even though I try to avoid using my first idea, this one in particular kept coming back to me.

The iconic slasher poster used a cutout of a man holding a knife with a painting of camp councils in the inlay. It’s simple but effective. I wanted to pay homage to this horror poster in my own way.

The story goes like this: Frankie’s Pizzaria has finally reopened after over a year of being forcibly shut down by government bureaucrats. Frankie has been forced to retire and sell his business to new owners who insist on keeping the pizzaria’s iconic name. But the reopening doesn’t go so smoothly. Late night employees are ending up dead and the pencil-pushing bureaucrats responsible for Frankie’s shutdown are beginning to get mysterious deliveries that aren’t piping hot pizzas…but piping hot death.

I took a picture of myself holding a pizza cutter and cut it out using the pen tool. When using the pen tool, I stroked the path with a brush tool that had a charcoal setting. This gave the outline that rough edge. The title was made sorta similar, rasterizing the type text and using a blood flow behind it. I used a series of textures to make it all look very old, torn, vintage, and worn.

Week 46: Become a Painter

03/31/2022

Week 46: Egyptian Flapper
Project: Become a Painter

This week was a tough challenge in terms of decision making. I had already done a water painting conversion a few weeks back and didn’t want to repeat myself with this week’s challenge. And there are certainly many programs now available as Photoshop plugins that will easily allow you to turn a photograph into a painting, comic strip, pencil sketch, etc. Stuff like SnapArt is what I usually use because I like the canvas textures readily available and the level of customization.

My initial idea was to scan my arms with a desktop printer/scanner. Then, I was going to layer the right arm and left arm on top of each other—having one as a pencil sketch; the other as a photo—then cut slits out of the image to make it look like the sketch and photo are layered above and below each other.

I hated it so much I just deleted everything entirely and started over with something else.

I ended up taking a portrait of Gina, dressed almost like an Egyptian Flapper, and used a similar approach in layering the image with a painting on top and revealing cutouts to show the photo underneath.

It’s not my favorite thing but it might lead to something better using a similar approach.

Personally, I prefer the non-painting-effect image.

Aside from all that, I took the opportunity to really map out how this image was going to be shot and lit. I recently came across a program called Set.A.Light 3D. It’s a program that allows you to place a 3D model into a studio space, add lights, add modifiers, add a backdrop, all that jazz, and adjust everything until it looks like you want it. Then, you will know how to set up your lights, where to place your camera, and have a better idea on how to get the scene going so there’s less fiddling around with the model waiting for you to sort things out. It even lets you export the image and physical setup to show others how it was arranged. Pretty cool, eh?

Week 47: Tone To Set The Mood

04/13/2022

Week 47: Sweet Charity
Project: Tone To Set The Mood

I had an opportunity to shoot a set of promo pics for an upcoming live performance of Sweet Charity. To prepare for this, I tried to muscle my way through the movie version to get a better understanding of the plot and characters.

What I like to do when shooting these type of character pics for promo ads and social media marketing is meet each actor, then ask the actor their character name, what kind of traits could be ascribed to them, and inquire on their character arc–where they begin and where they end. I pick a trait like “flirty” or “aggressive” and we create a portrayal of that.
These shots were a challenge because the stage props weren’t done yet. We ended up shooting in front of the black curtain which I knew I was going to have to replace. All the stage shots had to have their backgrounds replaced, too. Basically, the only shot that didn’t have a background replacement was the shot at the bar. Each character had to be cut out of their original scene and a new background was made which corresponded to their costume. So, each character in this series is posed in such a way to signify some aspect or their personality and I used the colors of their outfit to tone the image and pull the scene together.

I tried to make it look vintage by calming down the contrast and used complimentary colors that were either loud or pastel so it went with the theme of the show. The “It’s ______” tagline on each image goes with a certain scene in the play and movie. There’s a part where all these people in a club are asking “who is she…who is she” and it cuts to Charity where she says, “It’s me.” This is the scene The Office referenced when Michael Scott came back to Dunder Mifflin after trying to start the Michael Scott Paper Company. Pam and Ryan are holding up a piece of paper to hide Michael and they’re saying “who is it, who is it” until it’s revealed that “…it’s Michael Scott.”

To achieve the effect of pulling the character, background, and little flower overlays together, I predominantly did two things: used a color overlay on the character which corresponded to the background color, then did a final gradient map with complimentary colors that connected to the most prominent color in the costume. For the main image here, I used red and white in the highlights and double-complimentary colors to fall in the shadows. For the character of Charity, this gave a sense of joy and liveliness.

Week 48: Mirror Your Image

04/26/2022

Week 48: Powder Portrait
Project: Mirror Your Image

I’m gonna be honest. The whole reason why I missed a week wasn’t because I was sick, out of town, on vacation, or supe-duper busy. It’s because I bought Elden Ring and became slightly addicted to it. Yep, that’s the reason. I became obsessed with leveling-up, killing dragons, swinging swords, and dying over and over again.

But it may have influenced this week’s work. The challenge is all about mirroring your image, i.e. manipulating the image in such a way so that flipping some aspect of a copy helps out or adds something to it. The finished image ended up looking like a Tarnished…or maybe an ancient relic.

Mirroring an image: Well, what do people say makes an attractive face? Symmetry. So, I decided to take an image of my face and mirror it for a symmetrical aesthetic. Here’s the thing, I’ve always had these two moles on the side of my face that I always hated. When I was in High School I wanted to have them removed. I was told by removing them it might created divots in my face. So, I decided to stick with them. Now, I see them as just part of my face and I don’t really notice them anymore. That is, until they’re digitally removed. I actually wanted to flip the side of the face that had the moles but found it to be a bit too on point and predictable. I ended up covering myself and my hair in baby powder. I knew it was going to be in black and white so I opted out of using holi powder and instead went with baby powder to add this ghostly texture.

Did I intend on this looking like the Shroud of Turin? No. But it certainly came out that way. Let’s just say it’s an homage to the Tarnished of Elden Ring and we’ll call it a day.

Week 49: Porcelain Skin

05/13/2022

Week 49: Radagon/Marika
Project: Porcelain Skin

I’ve been on a bit of an Elden Ring kick as of late and it’s begun to creep in and influence me. This week’s challenge was on porcelain skin. I’ve done this before in the past, so I didn’t want to repeat anything or just post an old image. The idea here was to not only do the porcelain skin look but to also blow it apart from the inside out.

What we’ve got here is a character from the game (sorta, I’m not entirely clear on the story) that is bound to a rune arc and being blown apart by the Elden Ring rune configuration from within…I think. Again, the story is a bit vague to me and every time I try to watch a lore video on it my eyes just glaze over and I forget to give a care.

This actually took me quite a while to figure out how to do. I tried many things to achieve the damage to the skin while giving it an open cavity effect. I tried combining broken jar fragments, manually drawing it in and painting it myself, and finally I figured out how to combine some images of potholes. Of course, I had to do a lot of composite work with the stone and peeling-back effect. I also made the rune arc from scratch since I couldn’t find one big enough for the image I was working on. The porcelain skin look was achieved by desaturating the oranges in just the skin areas, increasing the luminosity of the remaining oranges, and then doing a bit of finishing touches with frequency separation.

Week 50: Darken, Lighten, Make A Masterpiece

05/30/2022

Week 50: Snake Skull
Project: Darken, Lighten, Make A Masterpiece

This challenge here is about using blending modes to create a unique image, in particular the darken and lighten blending modes. For those that aren’t familiar with Photoshop, there are these things called blending modes which can be used for a variety of purposes: there’s the “color” blending mode to change or alter color; there’s the “luminosity” blending mode to increase or decrease the luminosity without affecting the color; there’s the “soft light,” “multiply,” “saturation,” and so on and so on.

For the Darken/Multiply blend modes, it basically disregards the lighter pixels and keeps the darker pixels (great for creating shadows). And then there’s the Screen/Lighten blend modes which gets rid of the darker pixels and keeps the lighter ones (basically what I used for the dust overaly).

It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do for this challenge because I’d been using blending modes quite a lot in all of these challenges. I opted to do the x-ray within an x-ray effect. By that, I mean, we’ve got an x-ray showing the skull, but within the skull we have a snake skeleton which would appear darker.

To create this image, I got Gina to lie down on a board placed on top of two sawhorses. I used a fan to blow her hair around and a small Godox strobe to light just her hair. I also used a reflector to put a bit of light on the edge of her knowing that I needed the side of her face to be rather dark.

The skull was put into place and I used a Screen blending mode to keep the lighter pixels. I had to liquify the skull to make it fit her head. Then, I put a snake x-ray into place, inverted it, warped it, and then used a Hard Light blending mode (if I remember correctly), to work within the skull. But, I then used an eel skull x-ray and warped it into the snake skeleton and change that to a Screen blending mode since the eel head and neck were outside the skull and lying along the tongue.

The hair effect was done by using the Color Dodge blending mode to make these pops of color in the lighting accents.

Just two more challenges to go, folks.

Week 51: Composite

06/07/2022

Week 51: Shrek: The Musical
Project: Composite

I was a busy boy last month with lots of gigs. One of the gigs afforded me the chance to squeeze in this week’s challenge: compositing. I did a promo shoot for a live production of Shrek: The Musical; however, the props for the show weren’t quite done yet. So, I shot the actors in front of the black curtain with the idea that I was going to cut them out and place them in some sort of beautiful, Irish landscape.

I knew I wanted to have their backs against a sunset so I backlit them a tad for some scenes. I also knew that for some shots I wanted to place in things like butterflies. So, I had them pose as if they were handling a pretty butterfly. Further adjustments involved blending in the makeup edges and fur. Ever cut out fur in Photoshop? It’s not easy…but I’ve got tricks.

I did some similar stuff for Refuge Aerial. They wanted some shots of their annual showcase and, like always, I included some artsy shots that they could include on social media and for next year’s marketing.

All this involved me cutting out the subjects from the background and using special brushes to mask iin the difficult elements. Each character was a challenge: Donkey had fur to cut out, Shrek’s vest had fuzzy edges, and the Princess had strands of hair. All are quite the challenge in masking around.

Getting a cut out is the first step in a good backplate composite. Not to mention that the backplate and the subject need to have the same horizon line and perspective. Some tricks I use to make the images match up is getting rid of the edge fringe and color contamination, adjusting and coloring the edges to correspond with the color and light behind them, doing many curves adjustments to match the shadows and highlights, matching the contrast, matching the hue, matching the luminosity, matching the saturation. And, of course, there’s always recreating the shadows or compositing in the existing shadows.

Week 52: Be Unusual with Displacement Maps

06/14/2022

Week 52: Wall Montage
Project: Be Unusual with Displacement Maps

Using a displacement map in Photoshop will allow you to wrap an image more realistically to the surface of something. In a way, it reminds me of bump maps. I would use a bump map for planetarium stuff to make realistic-looking planet models. Basically, you take a satellite image, desaturate it, bump up the contrast, and then use that image as a bump map where the dark areas register as areas of declination and the brighter areas register as points of inclination. Displacement maps are similar in that it takes the contours of a texture and distorts the image, almost shrink wrapping it in place.

Of course, to further sell the effect, you use blending modes to help blend the layers together.

I really thought about this challenge to try to come up with something unique but every idea I thought about had already been done to death. So, I just thought, this is the last challenge, why not combine images from past challenges and make a montage in some way. Then, I remembered there’s this colorful wall in downtown Baton Rouge a lot of photographers use for family portraits. Why not take some images I’ve done, put them inside some of the colored squares, make them look like paintings, and warp them to the bricks? I mean, there’s stuff like this downtown already with all the graffiti, right?

So, originally this is a brick wall, painted with a bunch of colored squares. I took the original image, bumped up the contrast in the green channel, made it an 8-bit file, turned it black and white, and saved it as a displacement map file. The faces, images, and shadow were added later. For each image, I added the displacement map so that it would look at the contours of the bricks and distort the image so it looks like its been painted on. I also used “blend if” sliders to make it look weathered and so that the paint wasn’t sticking to everything. I also used custom brushes to selectively wipe away the paint as if it’s been weathered away or faded by the sun. If you look at this close-up image to the left you can see how the paint isn’t applied to lower layers of broken brick, and how it conforms to the curve of where the brick ends and the mortar begins.

And that’s it. It’s been over a year of doing this. I skipped a few weeks from having Covid-19, getting kidney stone surgery, and going through a bad hurricane, but I finish what I start, folks. I learned a lot and got out of my comfort zone to do things I wouldn’t normally do. Now, on to something completely different.

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