Some of you know that the photographic lighting supplier, Westcott, did a pretty crazy cool thing at Photoshop World this year in Vegas. They set up four shooting sets and had live models, lights, props and watchers on hand and then let the public go nuts shooting the models. The payoff if that IF you enter their contest and IF you win, your image will be the Westcott catalog and you get some lighting equipment. And let me tell you that after shooting with their spiderlights, I’m lusting after a set of those lights! Cool, nicely balanced and bright, they are easier than strobes when shooting something like this where a subtle change in position or expression can have a profound impact in the image. Since the lights are continuous, you can shoot as fast as you can click the shutter without worry of the strobe not keeping up. In my studio here in Orange, this type of shooting works really well. I shoot strobes alot but after working with “hot lights” twice now, I really can see the value of them, especially the new cool “hot” lights.
Here are my entries for the contest. I’m also including a few shots of the sets so you can see the environment we had to work in. I used several different techniques with my entries. I worked only with the props and set given, I replaced the background in one, I flipped one to a “painting” using CS5′s new bristle brushes and I worked the tones. In all case though, the overriding concerns were sharpness, content, composition and overall impact of the image. I feel that without a sharp image and good solid composition, all the post work in the world will not push a bad image up the ladder.
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- woodland fantasy – westcott shoot
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- Westcott Spider light used at expo shoot
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- Westcott Pin Up shoot overhead shot – Canon G11
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- Top Hat before painting in CS5
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- Top hat after painting with CS5 bristle brushes
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- Steampunk – Westcott Shoot
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- Risque Cat Still Life at Westcott Shoot
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- Catwoman Sideways – Background Replacement
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- Catwoman set at Westcott shoot
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- Catwoman in Gotham – Westcott Shoot
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- Bond, James Bond – Westcott shoot
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- Attitude – Westcott Shoot
Related articles
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Photoshop or your editor of choice actions can help you cut time corners to make a better end product like blog entries. Say what? Oh yes, you can adapt tools normally used for a task like making albums into a killer tool for making story boards for blogs or displays or whatever else comes to mind. I just used my favorite album software from Fundy to make a batch of story boards for my blog here. Yes I could buy actions to do this but I wanted to see if I could do something close on my own with Photoshop.
I already have a couple of flavors of album making software, LumaPix, You Select It (YSI) and FundySOS Album builder. Since I’m on a Mac, I prefer to use Fundy Album builder. While LumaPix would do a really nice job, it’s Windows only and I need to start up XP just to make these. It’s more work then I want right now. Fundy means I never leave my workflow. This is not intended to be a review of Fundy’s software but suffice to say it’s pretty powerful and is adaptable to virtually anything that requires arranging images, not just wedding albums.
Here is a sample of a three by three story board of a shoot in Colorado that I shot last year. I tossed together in Fundy Album builder in a few minutes. Not only can I make the grid but I can save it as a design then load it back up and automatically fill the grids or fill them by hand. It can takes less than 5 minutes to make the entire grid and fill it this way. And I just have to insert ONE picture into the blog instead of a dozen or more.
3x3 Wedding Story Board
And it does not have to be squares, it can be any shape I want, singles, squares, grids, puzzles and more. Also, this is not just for blogs, this technique of story boarding or building paneled images can be sold to a client or used in an album or picture book. So the time invested in making the templates can be time well spent. And yes, I had to buy the software but I had bought it to make my wedding albums so now I’m using the same software for two or three other uses without having to buy anything else. That is money saved and in your pocket.
Here is a type of grid that is called a “puzzle” with several images from a local coffee house in the city of Orange called Chapman Coffee. My business, Michael Sweeney Photography, had some art hung on the walls there for a while and I had taken pictures for their website. Now I’m using them to illustrate a second type of collage that you can put into your blog by using album building software. I started with a blank canvas set to 1024 pixels square and used Fundy’s Album Builder Ninja layout and CS4 to make the puzzle. You can of course, make the squares manually using just Photoshop.
Chapman Coffee House Puzzle
And you can take a single picture and use the panels as a design element. Use a strong picture and add a bit of space between the sections and you get a very cool effect. In this case, I made a quad panel and used a picture of a 1957 Chevy Bel Air automobile that I shot at the “Cars and Coffee” car show in Irvine, California. This image of the car works well spread across the four panels with a visual break between each panel and gives an idea for a wall hanging upsell to the client.
1957 Chevy Quad Panel
If all this is cool but you either dont have existing tools like FundySOS or you just dont want spend the time to mess around with Photoshop, then you can buy actions from a variety of places such as MCP who has the “Blog It Boards” among others. The actions give you a very fast way to get started on this type of presentation of your images. You can find some free ones at coffeephotography.blogspot.com but keep in mind that free is good, sometimes paying for something is better.
So the take away is that for your blog, instead of fighting with posting a dozen images which can also be swiped, make a storyboard of them and post that. Everyone gets to see the pictures, admire your artistic skills in layout and you can shave time off the editing of your post. You can also incorporate your album software or actions into your workflow as design elements.
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