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 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
Many of you have a flash and I would venture to guess it’s attached to your hot shoe. Now, there are more adventurous types of you who have ventured out to off-camera flash with some sort of remote either with a cord attached to your hot shoe or a wireless remote like a Pocket Wizard. I was using my off camera flash yesterday with my model Lynlee at the Morgan Creek Vineyard when the opportunity came up for me to demonstrate the power of shadows.
The problem with the light yesterday was that it was 7PM and had been raining so there wasn’t much sun at all. I did my best to create my own sunshine. So I had Lynlee stand between two rows of vines while I shot over at her from slightly behind her left side. My assistant stood in the same aisle with her in the first picture with the flash (umbrella attached) pointed right at her. I looked at the picture and thought the light from the flash was good enough but the results weren’t what I desired.
Rule: Shadows make a photo more interesting not light. Actually, you do have to have light to create shadows which is the trick…use your light source to create shadows that make shots more intriguing. You wouldn’t put your subject looking directly into the sun would you? Of course not! You would put them turned slightly with the sun at the side or back of their head.
I had my assistant go over one more row of vines to the next aisle and point the flash up and over the vines at the right side of her face which created shadows on the left side of her face. I included a before and after shot to illustrate…
Light creates shadows when used correctly
The problem with this is going to be how do you get that $300 Canon 580 off the hot shoe right? A 6ft cord attached to the flash and the camera wouldn’t allow you to more your flash around very far. More on that later…yes it’s just more money!
2008-2009 UCP Annual Report
My friends at United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) of Birmingham (follow them on Twitter) asked me to do specific portraits for their annual report using some of the participants in their program along with some of their contributors. Jennifer Ellison wanted something in black and white which we did and they turned out very nicely. Another goal was to try and get some natural and fun interactions between everyone in the subjects and at least one group was having a lot of fun dancing and showing off but they didn’t make the cut for obvious reasons….but there was fun in all these shots. In the shot on the right Daniel is an obvious Auburn fan (who knows why right?) and we had fun picking back and forth about Alabama vs Auburn and shouting “Roll Tide!”
One of the challenges of getting all the shots together of everyone was organizing everyone to be ready on the same day which didn’t happen. The shoot took place on 3 different days with the first day done by bring my mobile studio to their beautiful headquarters and the next two days were shot at my studio. There was one girl program participant who just wouldn’t smile for the camera – until I left to check out one of my lights that had stopped working when I heard everyone yelling at me, “Alan! She’s smiling get over here!” Thankfully we got the shot!
I will post one shot that didn’t make the Annual Report cut but gives some idea of the fun time we all had together.
The Ceci's of Huntsville, AL
On the left I included the page from the March 2010 edition of Family Circle Magazine and on the left included one of the family shots that I personally loved. We shot that at the The Davidson Center for Space Exploration next to US Space & Rocket Center. The story was to highlight the Ceci’s civic involvement as well as the city of Huntsville. I learned some cool things about Huntsville I didn’t know which was how much history exists there especially in the area of Twickenham Historic District which includes the oldest house in Alabama which was built in 1814. There I also found the childhood home of actress Tallulah Bankhead.
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Thanks to the good people at Southern Living I have the tear sheets from the Healthy Living Section from January’s edition. It is really cool to see talented designers put together a visually appealing layout of text and photos like they did here….unlike my feeble attempt here to show them! |
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January - Healthy Living Section
Thanks to WonderfulMachine.com for being found by Southern Living. I got the pleasure of meeting lots of good people both at the magazine and at the bootcamp (BirminghamBootCamp.com). Mary Zarate really kicks everyone into gear out there in Mountain Brook for Birmingham Boot Camp. Everyday that we had planned to shoot it was raining like crazy. There was a tight deadline so we finally found one morning early that was dry – 8AM! Ok that’s not that early but for me it was especially when it was that cold. Thanks to everyone for a good shoot.