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Here in Alabama we have a radio show called Rick & Bubba and every Friday during the college football season they have a character who impersonates Lou Holtz (the former coach for Notre Dame). During “Coach Lou’s” wilder moments he talks about dreams he has about thousands of leprechauns (reference to the Fighting Irish) all calling him “daddy” so – we thought it would make a great photo to have a leprechaun go out with “Lou” and watch a game together. Great fun! Thanks to everyone who helped to pull this fun off!
Once again I am honored to have written for Ron Dawson’s Dare Dreamer blog. This one delves into our internal motivations about being an artist and questions our motives. Are you an Approval Junkie like me? Read More….
I am honored to have been featured as a guest blogger on Ron Dawson’s Dare Dreamer blog where I wrote an article entitled Disaster Porn. Ron is someone I have admired for many years and learned so much through his podcasts. Recently on Facebook he put out a call for guest bloggers so I emailed him what I would like to write about and he graciously accepted….Read more here.
I love my gear but when I started out I didn’t have too much gear and no artificial lighting. Eventually, I began buying strobes and then portable power packs and am now quite addicted to lighting just about everything I do even to the point I feel to have a successful and beautiful portrait I have to use artificial light.
I get asked a lot about my lighting and how I do things and I’m glad to talk about it. However, this portrait of my daughter was all natural light. I wanted to share it because (besides being proud of her – ok and she is really pretty) of how beautiful is the lighting.
Meg
Since becoming a photographer I notice light. I see it everywhere I go. This evening at the dinner table the light from the evening sun was pouring in the kitchen but was also being diffused by the trees and the door facing was flagging the sun so it wasn’t hitting her face directly. You can see behind her how the sun is pouring in. Beautiful glow. This can be tricky because with subjects being back lit you can have dark faces. One way to compensate is to use a fill from a reflector board (or silver insulation from Home Depot thank you, David Bean) and that will put some of the light from behind onto her face. You photographers who have been shooting a while will already know this. But, in this photo I did not use a fill. What I did was expose for her face which balanced quite nicely with the brightness from behind her.
Anyway – my point with this post is to 1) stop thinking you have to have more equipment always, 2) notice light always and 3) have your camera nearby when God paints a picture before your eyes. And it doesn’t hurt one bit to have a great subject!
I have been taking portraits and other photographs around Alabama of the recent damage from the tornado outbreak on April 27th. I wanted to use a photo from this to demonstrate a technique using a simple before and after with the use of Selective Color Layer in Photoshop CS5. I thing that Camera Raw does a nice job most of the time when basic editing for white balance and saturation but sometimes things look askew to my eye. In the example below I see two main problems. 1) John’s skin is too red for my taste and 2) the green around is too “lime-ish” in color. So with selective color layer I got more what I felt was realistic with a few tweaks.
Before Selective Color
After Selective Color
Red Channel - I pulled back the black slider because I felt his skin was too red. I removed a touch of the magenta and yellow and added some cyan to get the skin like I liked it.
Yellow Channel - The green was too lime-like so with the Yellow channel I added a good bit of black, took down the yellow, added magenta and took down cyan to reduce the green.
Cyan Channel – For the sky and his jeans I added a touch of cyan and black
Blue Channel - I added black + 19, yellow + 27, magenta + 30 and cyan +14
Recently, I had a photoshoot with 2 different girls in the same town. Montgomery is about a 1 hour drive from me and I knew that I wanted to split the day in half by shooting one girl in the morning and one in the afternoon before I had to drive home to Birmingham. Always I’m trying to think of something completely new and different regarding situations or props. Sometimes I get inspired by looking at pictures of the models or the subject to determine what we will do. A shoot like this is a bit different than an assignment from a magazine. When a magazine asks for me to shoot someone they are profiling they send me out and leave it up to me to do a portrait. In those cases I just have to figure it out when I arrive but in this case I planned ahead.
I have connections all over with lots and frequently cars are a good thing. I knew from past shoots that my friend who is a member of the British Motor Club that perhaps that is where I could start on finding someone in another town and sure enough that’s what I did. I saw on their site a guy with a vintage convertible Porsche but he had moved to another town and unavailable. But, the club president referred me to Mr. Diaz who didn’t have a Porsche but mini-coopers PLUS an airplane he willingly offered for us to use.
My assistant, John David, and I headed out early and met up with Mr. Diaz and Janna (our first shoot). One thing to notice in the video is how I made use of one location to get multiple shots and looks. Of course I was in a 1950′s era airplane hanger with a 2010 Cirrus that happened to have an old yellow bike and some cool lockers but my point is that if you really think through a shoot and a location you can achieve multiple shots from one location.
Sadly, the battery ran down on the video camera by the afternoon and we didn’t get any footage of Haden in the alley shoot. I climbed up on top of the roof of an adjacent building (thanks to Jamie for leading the way) where I tore my jeans (hey thanks guys for not pointing that out to me!) on the way up or down – can’t remember which. Check below for some of those photos.
Another lesson for photographers – while shooting Haden’s photos in the residential neighborhood in and around the mini-cooper we saw a lady walking with her enormous Bulldog! It so happens that I don’t meet a stranger and I’m pretty proactive (some say cocky but that’s another story) so I said hello and asked if we could borrow her pooch! The dog turned out to be a big handful but Haden handled it well and I think we got at least a couple of worthy shots. My advice: try anything that comes to mind!
Now, on to the video! John David did a great job shooting this on the 7D (thank you Canon!) and I edited it and had a great time doing so….
Sometimes I take a picture I consider “iconic” like this one. It’s of Scott Dawson. Scott is an acquaintance of mine from the community but he’s also an evangelist of the gospel. This year, Stadiumfest featured music from TobyMac and Casting Crowns among others. I volunteered to cover the event for Scott and near the end I was able to capture this image as he gave an invitation for people to come forward. It just so happened that the spotlight hit him at just the right moment.
Scott Dawson
Last summer I got a call from Lawdragon to shoot portraits of two lawyers here in Alabama for their journal. Lawdragon is a national portal listing of lawyers, evaluations and lawyer profiles and for this assignment they wanted to spotlight lawyers outside of their offices and not in suits. The direction was to place them in environments that matched up with something regarding their own hobbies or interests outside of the office. Jere Beasley and Ralph Cook were my two assignments. I have been wanting to release these for months but as it usually turns out the time between the shoot and when pictures are published sometimes stretches out further than one may expect.
Mr. Beasley lives in Montgomery and was Lt Governor during one of George Wallace’s terms as governor. In fact, Jere was acting governor for 30 days after George Wallace was shot. Mr. Beasley’s office was a short walk from the Montgomery Biscuits’ ball park. At this point I forgot the exact involvement Mr. Beasley has with the park itself and the land on which it sits now but I do remember that he loves to watch them play! That’s where we decided to go for our portraits.
Jere Beasley
Mr. Cook lives in Birmingham and is a lawyer with a firm downtown. I found out that he was the former Supreme Court Chief Justice of Alabama which is a big deal for such a humble and personable man. I called him to discuss the shoot and discover his hobbies and fishing came to the top. He gladly volunteered to bring his hat, vest, waders and fly rod to our shoot. We chose the lake at Oak Mountain to shoot and I waded (minus waders) into the water with him and my assistant positioned my strobe toward Mr. Cook (i.e. held the strobe to keep it from falling into the water).
Ralph Cook
A few volunteers
It’s been several weeks since I spent 4 days in Seattle. I’ve had a lot to digest and I am still in the process of digesting all I learned and am anticipating putting some new thoughts toward my creative process after the Christmas holidays are done.
Jeremy Cowart was an amazing teacher but a more amazing person as he juggles his success with humility almost like he doesn’t quite get it that he’s a superstar. He doesn’t come across as a superstar either because when at dinner he will talk to you about the important things like family and faith not photography so much.
Help-Portrait is something I heard about last year and didn’t participate in but am glad I did this year. I took the role of workflow from getting the photos from the cards into Photoshop and processed before going to print. I didn’t get to shoot any portraits that day of those who came in for their free portraits but I did get to shoot some portraits of other volunteers and people I got to call friends for too brief of a time!
I enjoyed the camaraderie that day as all creatives mingled and got to know one another while serving. Next year I will serve again but more on the front lines so I can experience more of the impact Help-Portrait can have on people.
Thank you, my Seattle-Friends for making my time there worthwhile!
Jeremy Cowart has been (and still is) one of my favorite photographers to watch and learn from for the past couple of years. It’s people like him who, along with their humility, inspire and prod me along to be better and better. He is going to be demonstrating live photoshoots called Experimental Portraiture (Info here) on Thursday and Friday (Dec 2,3) via CreateLIVE (http://www.creativelive.com) and I’m going to be there to watch in person and hopefully not annoy him with my admiration.
He asked for video submissions from Photographers and I submitted one – and he chose me and one other photographer to come and be in the audience and shadow him. I thought it would be entertaining to post my video submission if not embarrassing. I enjoyed being creative with it at least and I decided to put myself out there and take the advice from Chase Jarvis to just create!
If you are on Twitter be sure to send questions in between 10am – 5pm Pacific Time to @creativeLIVE and use the hashtag #creativeLIVE and #cjlive.
Can’t wait!