This is still a work in progress. I shot the model and the statues in the studio, while the temple background is a 3D computer animated set. Once this piece is finished I’ll replace the image here and provide more of a description of the work done.
We photographed Katrina in a few different Victorian outfits for our Vintage Fashion website. I took a few of the photos and gave them the old glass plate treatment. By layering different textures into the photo in Photoshop, I take a perfectly good photograph and make it look old and beat up. Just the opposite of what I’m usually doing on the old photo restoration side of the business.
Because this month’s picture was created, rather than just photographed, I thought it would be fun to show you how it came together. I’ve done several pirate photoshoots both in the studio and on location, but this time I wanted to create something more theatrical.
The pirate was played by Michelle, who I met last year photographing her for her senior portrait. I shot Michelle against a blue backdrop that I new would be close to the shade of blue I’d want for the night sky. This made it easier to drop out the background and not leave a tell-tale fringe. The hardest part of lighting Michelle was getting the right balance of backlighting so that it would look like the moonlight was shining through her blouse. The color temperature for this shot was cooled way down to give it a blueish cast so it would look like a night shot.
A few days later I photographed the pirate ship against the same blue background. The pirate ship is a model that Andy Doerner built for Lori and I in 1999. It was lit in the studio to make it appear as the light was coming from the moon. I used one snooted strobe up on a boom to approximate the moonlight.
The sky and ocean came from a shot I took on a vacation in Mexico. Different treatments were done to both the sky and the water to get it to look like night. It seemed a waste to use such a colorful sunset, but I liked the highlights on the water and the clouds in the sky.
The moon was added from a public domain image shot by NASA. For the finishing touch, the stars in the sky were added on a separate layer in Photoshop.
After moving away to the big city, Maria’s return to Humboldt County coincided with the blooming of my favorite wildflower patch. Maria and I had shot at this location a few years ago, and it’s a spot I find so beautiful that I try and return there every year. Last year we had such a late spring that when I visited it at the normal time the flowers were just getting started. That also happened to be the day that all the forest fires started and so I didn’t make a return trip back last year because it was so smoky.
So it was with great anticipation that I was looking forward to shooting there again during Maria’s visit. On the drive up, it kept getting foggier and foggier and we almost turned back. But just as I was thinking of turning the truck around, we’d get a break in the fog and it would encourage me on. Not knowing if there’d be enough light to shoot with when we got there, and if we would hit the flowers at their peak, we proceeded on, until finally we rounded one corner and there they were. My first thought was if nature can put on such a spectacle of color, how come the weeds in my yard aren’t this pretty?
The fog rolling through added to the scene, and we shot for about an hour before it finally just got too dark. Even though the display only lasts for a week or so, it’s such a beautiful spot it has a permanent date on my calendar.
While we were in San Jose last month, I thought I would take the opportunity of being in the big city to work with a make up artist. Searching on Model Mayhem, I found Wendy Tran who helped transform the model, Danielle. I’ve had an ambitious idea for an Egyptian themed shoot for awhile, but it’s been hard to locate a make up artist to work with in the Ferndale area. So I used this as a test of the make up concept. It was a lot of fun working with Wendy and Danielle, and they both did great work. This was Danielle’s first attempt at modeling and she seemed a natural at it.
After creating the image for last October’s Picture of the Month, I thought more and more about old Hollywood glamour style lighting as practiced by photographers like George Hurrell. I wanted to experiment more with that style, which is dramatically different from what I typically use for portraits. So when Chynna contacted me about working together, I thought it would be a good opportunity to experiment in the studio.
In the 1930s they typically used hot lights with fresnel lenses to focus the light right where they wanted it. That also provided the hard contrasty light that is so indicative to that style. Not having fresnel lights nor the budget to purchase them, I made do with my studio strobes with open 5″ reflector dishes. 80 years ago they would have also had a number of gobos or flags and again my studio was lacking, so Photoshop had to come to the rescue for some of the final details.
I’ve admired the classic glamour portraits of Hollywood stars done in the 30s and 40s ever since I started doing portrait photography. While editing the photos from a recent photoshoot with Lula, this one struck me that the pose and outfit had a certain similarity to those classic photos. This is one case where Photoshop made the photo, as I used the program’s BW layer to adjust the lighting and darken the makeup. Nothing that couldn’t have been done in the darkrooms of the past, but it really changed the character of the photo. Sometimes it’s fun just to play with a photo and see what it wants to be, rather than what you intended it to be.
2008 is starting to look a lot like 1929. So it was only appropriate that we photographed this sheer beaded flapper dress from the 1920s one last time before it was sent off to it’s new owner. To help pay medical bills, we’ve been selling off some of Lori’s vintage clothing collection. Some of them have been hard to part with like this one because they’re so fun to photograph. Becki assumed the role of the jitterbugging flapper dancer for us. She’s looking in her purse, but just like in 1929, it appears to be empty.
Melaine was back visiting the North Coast so we used the opportunity to photograph her in some of our vintage clothes and some of Lori’s reproductions. The corset that Melaine is wearing is a reproduction of a 1776 corset, so you can picture that after our heroic forefathers finished wiping out the British, they came home to a pleasing site such as this. To add to the period feel, Photoshop was used to give the photograph a painterly texture.
After moving into my new permanent studio space I was anxious to work on some natural light portraiture. One reason I wanted the new space was that it offered big windows with a nice soft northern exposure, perfect for natural light portraits. Renée, the model, was dressed up in some of our Victorian clothing, including an 1890s corset.
Aesthetic Design & Photography • 989 Milton Ave, Suite 2A • P.O. Box 1355 • Ferndale, CA 95536
Telephone: (707) 786-4643 or Toll Free: (866) 786-4643 • Email
© Copyright 1999-2012 Aesthetic Design & Photography - All rights reserved. • Privacy Policy