Behind-the-scenes at Simone Associates Inc.

 

 

 

Hello everyone, so sorry it has been such a long absence, but things have been incredibly busy around here.  I’ve shot a number of projects with the RED ONE Digital Cinema Camera, (#213 for those of you who care) and hope to be writing about those experiences, workflow issues etc. very soon.

However, at the moment I thought you guys might be interested in a photograph I made last week.

I have been working on a project for quite a few months now photographing artists for an “Artists Trail” project that a group has gotten funding to create. The portraits will be used to promote the trail through the state tourism bureau.

I’ve completed five portraits so far and just did this one last week. I try as best I can to capture some “essence” of the artist. With that in mind I have no preconceived ideas when I go to an appointment.

I like to try to react to what I feel and see when meeting the person and seeing their space for the first time.

Gus Kermes is 84 years old. A long life in art, ranging from his days of layout and design, both graphic and industrial at New Holland Tractor Company to his ever present work in fine art. He also has quite an interest in antiques, and all of this is well represented in his lively space.

I just knew I had to photograph him surrounded by his art and objects.

The inner space you see in the photograph had a skylight which I used as the basis for lighting my shot.

There was also a large window camera left in the outer space.

I chose my camera position, using a Hasselblad H2 with a 35mm lens. It was fitted with a Phase one P45 back tethered to an Imac G5 workstation.

I placed one flash head inside the inner space pointed into the close left corner to add to Gus’s illumination which was otherwise all coming from the top skylight.

I spent about an hour photographing him in various positions, seated , standing etc. until I felt I had something.

I returned to the studio and loaded my session into Capture One. This frame was the obvious winner. I felt it truly captured him in a great body attitude and appearing to be examining his work. The pose was arrived at by my observing him standing as you see him during a quite moment, and remembering it, then coaxing him back into it when I was shooting.

The overall exposure was good, but lacked detail in the outer room’s shadow areas, and the bright area he is looking at was very bright as it happened to be getting hit by a direct bolt of sunlight.

I processed the file three ways, once for the normal, once for the shadows and once for the bright area. In Photoshop I stacked the processed Tiff’s and layer masked to reveal the areas I wanted.

 

The flattened file was good, manageable but lacked drama and contrast. But keep in mind, this was my intention at this step in the post process, as I had in mind my later steps.

Next I duplicated the blue channel, and copied and pasted it into a layer on top of the original, ran a pretty aggressive high radius, low amount unsharp mask on that layer and set it to luminosity.

 

 

After that some selective denoising using noise ninja was needed as this file was shot at ISO 400. I simply used the lasso tool to draw loose selections well feathered and then removed the noise.

Then began a process of isolating various elements in the photo and brightening or darkening them, and lots of Burning and Dodging using a mid gray softlight layer.

Sorry, I have no screen shots of these steps, as they move pretty rapidly and it is somewhat of an intuitive/interactive process, pushing and pulling, you know?

Finally, I increased overall saturation by about +8

Hope you enjoy!

As always questions are welcome.

Check out my interview on www.studiolighting.net. It is a cool website for info.

 

Bill

 

 

 

 

 

Â

Last week, Bill received an e-mail with a question about “The Boxer” post, and we thought we’d share it along with Bill’s answer. Luckily Bill caught the e-mail, as it had been sent to is junk box! So we’re going to request that any questions regarding the blog be made on this site, so to avoid missing them!

———————————–
————————————

Good day to you Bill. How are y
ou doing? I am a huge fan of your work! I saw your website on Flickr and have going on it almost everyday
I am particularly intrigued by the boxer girl photo. I am new to STROBIST and the HDR stuff. I work as a graphic designer so I get to do some cool stuff too sometimes.

I just had a super quick question for you, well I went through the boxer girl tutorial you were talking about in your blog and I had a hard time seeing the layers that you used in PS.

I am trying to get the same kind of look and was wondering if you would be so kind as to maybe send me the layers screen shot so that I could read what’s there.
I want to set up my PS file the way you have. I have included a screen capture to show you what I am talking about.

Thanks kindly,
And I hope to hear back from you.

Best regards

______________________________________________
SAMIT BHATIA

—————-
————————

Hello Samit!

Thanks for your
interest and inquiry.

As I was able to read the layers pallete in the email you sent to me, I will try to describe the layers from the bottom up.

The first layer is not relevant it is simply a merge of all above.

#2 Is the HDR room scene background.
#3 Is a duplicate of the Room Scene Background desaturated and changed to multiply blend mode. Then a layer mask was applied and a hole
“punched” in it with a large soft edge brush. The purpose of this layer is to softly darken the edges, a “vignette” if you will. I like this method as it does not add any weird
saturation.
#4 Is a curves adjustment layer activated after a selection was made. It creates the beam of light crossing behind her.
#5 Is the previously masked model on a transparent field.
#6 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, some simple additional face retouching.
#7 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a curves adjustment layer adjusting the shadow contrast on the face.
#8 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a curves adjustment of a selection of the eyes to brighten them.
#9 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a curves adjustment of a selection of the left eye only.
#10 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a curves adjustment of a selection of the hand tape on the right to darken and add contrast.
#11 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, same tape on left.
#12 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a curves adjustment layer to darken the model overall slightly.
#13 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a hue saturation adjustment layer to slightly alter the hue of the model.
#14 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a layer set to color on which I painted some warm tint into the ropes.
#15 I copied and pasted the ear and hands onto this layer and pulled out red. The hands and ears were a little too red.
#16 Is a layer set to color on which I painted the yellow into the windows on the right and wall on the left.
#17 Is a curves adjustment layer adjusting the yellow painted on the layer below.
#18 Is a softlight layer filled with 50% gray to burn and dodge the shorts to add to their dimension.
#19 Is the new catchlights in the eyes.

So thanks to Samit for his question and I hope everyone can benefit from this.
I think by far the most important thing to take away from this is that their is no “formula”. Each of these are subtle yet important details that contribute to the whole.
None or some of these may show up in another image. It all depends on what is required.

Thanks

Bill

After all the wonderful feedback we’ve received on the image “Boxer Chick”, we bring you another in-depth explanation from Bill, this time on a still life shot. Thanks to all those who took the time to contact us in regards to Bill’s work. Hope you enjoy!

The images:
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - - 8

From Bill:
Thanks to all of you who enjoyed the tutorial on my photograph “The Boxer”.
I thought it might be nice to follow that up with some insights into producing an ad using similar techniques, but not involving people.

I was approached by a high end graphic design studio whom I work with often to produce a series of ads for a consortium of tool manufacturers. Tools in the sense of machining tools. I know these look like drill bits, but they are actually machining tools, and are widely used in the aerospace and defense industries.

During preproduction meetings we were all given the opportunity to look at competitors ads and a variety of other work current in the industry.
The client wanted something “different”, dramatic, eyecatching”.

The designer showed them several concepts and examples of my work and everyone liked the idea of some sort of a composite.
The idea of making it look strong and dramatic like a movie poster was suggested.

The client supplied us with some of their favorite tools, and suggested that it would be appropriate to feature somehow a fighter jet.
The designer and I got together and brainstormed and sketched until we came up with several basic sketches of approaches we both liked.

This is my favorite one. It was the idea of the airplane in some “batcave, ominous location”. We talked about how it might evoke feelings of someone hiding the jet. Crazy minds huh?

The designer asked me if we should look for a stock photo of the jet. I suggested that he try to locate a detailed model, feeling confident I could make it look cool in the final composite.

I began by photographing the tools in a nice arrangement we had previsualized. I placed them on the metal step like piece in the photograph both to get variation in height, and also because I intended to actually show it in another version of the ad. I photographed the small tool on the left separately so that I might insure a highlight running the full length of the right side. When it was in the real arrangement the other tools prevented it from having a nice highlight and it looked rather dull.

They were photographed using lots of large diffuse light sources. Two 5′x10′ Chimera F2 banks (www.chimeralighting.com) each with two comet 2400 watt second heads were arranged left and right and behind the tools. These provided the full length highlights on the tools. A 2′x3′ Northlight(www.northlightproducts.com/) with a single comet 2400 watt second head was arranged above and slightly behind the tools. The camera, a cambo 4×5 fitted with a phase one h20 digital back, was placed slightly low to add to that “monumental” feeling for the tools. (www.cambo.com, www.phaseone.com). This was tethered to a Mac G5 workstation with a 23″ cinema display calibrated with eye one software/hardware. (http://usa.gretagmacbethstore.com/)
Finally, an 8′x8′ matthews (www.matthewsgrip.com/) diffuser was arranged angling from over the tools to just above the camera lens.
Behind this was placed a single comet 2400 watt second flash head with a 7″ reflector on a boom. This is the source that creates the nice gradated highlight on the front of the tools.

Meanwhile the designer got online and tracked down some very nice metal scale models of airplanes and ordered an appropriate fighter jet.
I simply photograped it on a neutral gray surface lit from above and behind with a 4′x4′ Northlight Bank with one comet 2400 watt second head installed.
Also with a Phase One H20 Back on a Cambo 4×5.

I have mentioned this before, and it is worth saying again. When compositing I try to use surfaces and make shadows that I can blend into the background shot. I used no fill light on the plane, only that single source so as to create an eerie, dramatic feel and to create a shadow that could be carried forth onto the surface it would be composited into.

I knew of some very cool abandoned industrial buildings close to me and secured permission to shoot. Inside one of them was this interior and I knew as soon as I saw it that it was perfect. I loved the strong perspective of the long space and also the skylights up top. Yes the tire tracks in the dirt floor were actually there and right away I thought how perfect to our concept that would be also. I made exposures to execute an HDR. These were done with a Canon 1DS. I believe I combined 5-8 bracketed frames. Bracketing with the shutter speed so as not to disturb focus.
I used Photoshop CS2’s merge to HDR function, and the photomatix tonemapping plugin. (www.hdrsoft.com/)

On the airplane I did a lot of contrast work with curves isolating areas with TK Luminosity masks available at http://www.goodlight.us/writing/luminositymasks/luminositymasks-1.html.

I like these alot as they allow me to work specific areas of the image. So let me take this opportunity to thank Tony Kuyper for providing all of us these fine tools. Visit his site www.GoodLight.us and see his awesome photography of the Colorado landscape. I also did a lot of airbrush and burn and dodge work and sharpening to “grit up” the airplane and help it to look like it belonged in the environment.

I extracted it primarily with photoshop’s pen tool carefully drawing a path. I did however keep the bottom intact so as to blend the natural shadow into the dirt floor. I did this using a layer mask.

The tools were enhanced through sharpening and burning and dodging, and localized increases in saturation. Primarily the copper and gold and blue.
The bottoms were gently blended into the scene using a layer mask.

This one involved many layers and lots of blending, and was very challenging and fun. All this work was executed using 16 bit tiff files. The final layers file was 886 Mb.

If anyone has any specific questions fire away!

Well, while Bill has a few video productions under wrap that were filmed with his RED Digital Cinema Camera (http://www.red.com/), I thought I’d show a small video of Bill testing this camera out in the studio with a lovely still life scene:

Enjoy the music playing in the background at the studio?  Hehe.

Stay tuned for an edit to this post this weekend that will include the video file Bill created!

I can’t believe it’s been a month since my last post!  How could I have let so much time pass by?  We’ve been getting busy around the studio again, and while Bill has been shooting nearly every day of every work week, I’ve been busy with some back-to-back retouching jobs.  After a small break over the winter, we began working again with a client that Bill has been shooting for, for nearly 20 years.  They’re among the leading manufacturers of dance and gymnastics costumes in America.  Starting in February Bill shoots for them roughly 2-3 weeks per month up to December, though there are several breaks scattered throughout this time.  Each photo shoot is a large job with multiple sets and many people involved to keep it running smoothly.  They output roughly 5 main catalogs, some twice a year, and various other supplements and publications.  The first to be printed this year is their line of leotards for gymnasts.  They have two different catalogs for this; one is a higher-end series for performance and the other is a little more light and fun.The following images first show the raw image developed without any adjustments.  The following paired images afterwards show the raw developed WITH adjustments followed by the final retouched photo.  You’ll notice that through tweaking the RAW file, more contrast and better flesh tone were achieved, giving me an advantage before even developing the file.

- Before/After

- Before/After

- Before/After

- Before/After

- Before/After

In order to give the skin tones pop while editing RAWs, I use the Color Editor feature in Capture One PRO to make a selection of the skin tone, then boost the saturation and/or lightness depending upon the lighting conditions.  Afterwards, I just save the ICC profile and am able to use it again for other images.  I have created several of these, all dependent upon the lighting of the image, the skin tone of the model, and various other criteria.  This method helps greatly helps minimize steps that would later be taken in retouching the file.